The Misuse of Mind | Page 2

that so many people read him, hoping that he will put into words and find an answer to the unformulated doubt that haunts them.
It was in this spirit that the writer undertook the study of Bergson. On the first reading he appeared at once too persuasive and too vague, specious and unsatisfying: a closer investigation revealed more and more a coherent theory of reality and a new and promising method of investigating it. The apparent unsatisfactoriness of the first reading arose from a failure to realize how entirely new and unfamiliar the point of view is from which Bergson approaches metaphysical speculation. In order to understand Bergson it is necessary to adopt his attitude and that is just the difficulty, for his attitude is the exact reverse of that which has been inculcated in us by the traditions of our language and education and now comes to us naturally. This common sense attitude is based on certain assumptions which are so familiar that we simply take them for granted without expressly formulating them, and indeed, for the most part, without even realizing that we have been making any assumptions at all.
Bergson's principal aim is to direct our attention to the reality which he believes we all actually know already, but misinterpret and disregard because we are biassed by preconceived ideas. To do this Bergson has to offer some description of what this reality is, and this description will be intelligible only if we are willing and able to make a profound change in our attitude, to lay aside the old assumptions which underlie our every day common sense point of view and adopt, at least for the time being, the assumptions from which Bergson sets out. This book begins with an attempt to give as precise an account as possible of the old assumptions which we must discard and the new ones which we must adopt in order to understand Bergson's description of reality. To make the complete reversal of our ordinary mental habits needed, for understanding what Bergson has to say requires a very considerable effort from anyone, but the feat is perhaps most difficult of all for those who have carefully trained themselves in habits of rigorous logical criticism. In attempting to describe what we actually know in the abstract logical terms which are the only means of intercommunication that human beings possess, Bergson is driven into perpetual self-contradiction, indeed, paradoxical though it may sound, unless he contradicted himself his description could not be a true one. It is easier for the ordinary reader to pass over the self contradictions, hardly even being aware of them, and grasp the underlying meaning: the trained logician is at once pulled up by the nonsensical form of the description and the meaning is lost in a welter of conflicting words. This, I think, is the real reason why some of the most brilliant intellectual thinkers have been able to make nothing of Bergson s philosophy: baffled by the self-contradictions into which he is necessarily driven in the attempt to convey his meaning they have hastily assumed that Bergson had no meaning to convey.
The object of this book is to set out the relation between explanations and the actual facts which we want to explain and thereby to show exactly why Bergson must use self-contradictory terms if the explanation of reality which he offers is to be a true one.
Having first shown what attitude Bergson requires us to adopt I have gone on to describe what he thinks this new way of looking at reality will reveal. This at once involves me in the difficulty with which Bergson wrestles in all his attempts to describe reality, the difficulty which arises from the fundamental discrepancy between what he sees the actual fact to be and the abstract notions which are all he has with which to describe it. I have attempted to show how it comes about that we are in fact able to perform this apparently impossible feat of describing the indescribable, using Bergson's descriptions of sensible perception and the relations of matter and memory to illustrate my point. If we succeed in ridding ourselves of our common-sense preconceptions, Bergson tells us that we may expect to know the old facts in a new way, face to face, as it were, instead of seeing them through a web of our own intellectual interpretations. I have not attempted to offer any proof whether or not Bergson's description of reality is in fact true: having understood the meaning of the description it remains for each of us to decide for himself whether or not it fits the facts.
KARIN STEPHEN.
Cambridge, January, 1922.

International Library of Psychology Philosophy and Scientific Method GENERAL EDITOR - - - - C. K. OGDEN, M. A.
(Magdalene College, Cambridge).
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