which can be apprehended by the senses—an idea consequently which only exists in the mind—is the cause of our other ideas?’”[1]
Thus, in the reasoning of Berkeley, the function of the brain cannot explain the production of ideas, because the brain itself is an idea, and an idea cannot be the cause of all our other ideas.
M. Bergson’s argument is quite similar, although he takes a very different standpoint from that of idealism. He takes the word image in the vaguest conceivable sense. To explain the meaning of this word he simply says: “images which are perceived when I open my senses, and unperceived when I close them.” He also remarks that the external objects are images, and that the brain and its molecular disturbances are likewise images. And he adds, “For this image which I call cerebral disturbance to generate the external images, it would have to contain them in one way or another, and the representation of the whole material universe would have to be implicated in that of this molecular movement. Now, it is enough to enunciate such a proposition to reveal its absurdity.”[2]
- ↑ I borrow this quotation from Renouvier, Le Personnellisme, p. 263.
- ↑ Matière et Mémoire, p. 3. The author has returned to this point more at length in a communication to the Congrès de Philosophie de Génève, in 1904. See Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, Nov. 1904, communication from H. Bergson entitled “Le Paralogisme psycho-physiologique.” Here is a passage from this article which expresses the same idea: “To say that the image of the surrounding world issues from this image (from the cerebral movement), or that it expresses itself by this image, or that it arises as soon as this image is suggested, or that one gives it to one’s self by giving one’s self this image, would be to contradict one’s self; since these two images, the outer world and the intra-cerebral movement, have been supposed to be of the same nature, and the second image is, by the hypothesis, an infinitesimal part of the field of representation, while the first fills the whole of it.”
