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48 |
"The same thing will be experienced
in the case of pressure and even weight.
| The sensations of pressure and
weight measured by extent of organism affected. |
When you say that a pressure
on your hand becomes stronger and stronger, see whether you do
not mean that there
first was a contact, then a pressure,
afterwards a pain, and that this pain itself, after having gone
through a series of |
qualitative changes, has spread further and further over
the surrounding region. Look again and see whether you do not bring in the more and more
intense, i.e. more and more extended, effort of resistance which
you oppose to the external
pressure. When the psychophysicist
lifts a heavier weight, he experiences, he says,
an increase of sensation. Examine whether this increase
of sensation ought not
rather to be called a sensation of increase.
The whole question is centred in this, for in the first case
the sensation would be a quantity like its external cause, whilst in the second it would
be a quality which had become
representative of the magnitude of its cause.
The distinction between the heavy and the light may seem to be
as old-fashioned and as childish as that between the hot and
the cold. But the very childishness of this distinction makes
it a psychological reality. And not
only do the heavy and the light impress our consciousness as
generically different, but the various degrees of lightness and
heaviness are so many species of these two genera. It must be
added that the difference of quality
is here translated spontaneously into a difference
of quantity, because of the
more or less extended effort which our body makes in order to
lift a given weight.
Of this you will soon become aware if you are asked to lift a
basket which, you are told, is full of scrap-iron, whilst in
fact there is nothing
in it." |
(Our bold, color, violet bold italic problematics and violet
bold problematics.)
Bergson restarts his footnote counts on each page. So to refer
a footnote, one must state page number and footnote number.
Our bold and color highlights follow a code:
- black-bold - important to read if you are just scanning
our review
- orange-bold - text ref'd
by index pages
- green-bold - we see Bergson
suggesting axiomatic memes
- violet-bold - an apparent
classical problematic
- blue-bold - we disagree
with this text segment while disregarding context of Bergson's
overall text
- gray-bold - quotable
text
- red-bold - our direct
commentary
Index
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| 49 |
"You will think you are losing
your balance when you catch hold of it, as though distant muscles
had interested themselves beforehand in the operation and experienced
a sudden disappointment. It is chiefly by the number and nature
of these sympathetic efforts, which take place at different points
of the organism, that you measure the sensation
of weight at a given point; and this sensation would
be nothing more than
a quality if you did not
thus introduce into it the idea of a magnitude. What strengthens
the illusion on this point is that we have become accustomed
to believe in the immediate perception of a homogeneous movement in a homogeneous space.
When I lift a light weight with my arm, all the rest of my body
remaining motionless, I experience a series of muscular sensations
each of which has its 'local sign,'
its peculiar shade: it is this series which my consciousness
interprets as a continuous movement in space. If I afterwards
lift a heavier weight to the same height with the same speed,
I pass through a new series of muscular sensations, each of which
differs from the corresponding term of the preceding series.
Of this I could easily convince myself by examining them closely.
But as I interpret this new series also as a continuous movement,
and as this movement has the same direction, the same duration
and the same velocity as the preceding, my consciousness feels
itself bound to localize the difference between the second series
of sensations and the first elsewhere than in the movement
itself. It thus materializes this difference at the extremity
of the arm which moves; it persuades itself that the sensation
of movement has been identical in both cases, while the sensation of weight differed in magnitude.
But movement and weight are but distinctions of the reflective
consciousness: what is present to consciousness immediately
is the sensation of, so to speak, a heavy movement, and this
sensation itself can be resolved by analysis into a series of
muscular sensations, each of which represents by its shade its
place of origin and by its colour the magnitude of the weight
lifted." |
(Our bold and color.)
Index
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