type is presented us by Taine and Stuart Mill. Already in chapters ii.
and iii. of the "Essay", and again all through "Matter and Memory", the
system is riddled with objections, each of which would be sufficient to
show its radical flaw. All the aspects, all the phenomena of mental life
come up for successive review. In respect of each of them we have
an illustration of the insufficiency of the atomism which seeks to
recompose the soul with fixed elements, by a massing of units exterior
to one another, everywhere and always the same: this is a grammatical
philosophy which believes reality to be composed of parts which admit
of number just as language is made of words placed side by side; it is a
materialist philosophy which improperly transfers the proceedings of the
physical sciences to the sciences of the inner life.

On the contrary, we must represent the state of consciousness to
ourselves as variable according to the whole of which it forms a part.
Here and there, although it always bears the same name, it is no longer
the same thing. "The more the ego becomes itself again, the more also
do its states of consciousness, instead of being in juxtaposition,
penetrate one another, blend with one another, and tinge one another
with the colouring of all the rest. Thus each of us has his manner of
loving or hating, and this love or hate reflect our entire personality."
("Essay on the Immediate Data", pages 125-126.)

At bottom Mr Bergson is bringing forward the necessity, in the case
before us, of substituting a new notion of continuous qualitative
heterogeneity for the old notion of numerical and spatial continuity.
Above all, he is emphasising the still more imperious necessity of
regarding each state as a phase in duration; and we are here touching on
his principal and leading intuition, the intuition of real duration.

Historically this was Mr Bergson's starting-point and the origin of
his thought: a criticism of time under the form in which common-sense
imagines it, in which science employs it. He was the first to notice
the fact that scientific time has no "duration." Our equations really
express only static relations between simultaneous phenomena; even the
differential quotients they may contain in reality mark nothing but
present tendencies; no change would take place in our calculations if
the time were given in advance, instantaneously fulfilled, like a linear
whole of points in numerical order, with no more g