The Thirty-Second Maudsley Lecture: Sensory Experience and Brain Structure

Abstract

It was in my early youth that I first read Bergson's Creative Evolution. At that time, as I recollect, it particularly captured my interest and attention because it seemed to embody certain essential principles which I had not found to be expressed quite so forcibly elsewhere. It is true that the validity of many of Bergson's speculations and ideas have since been seriously controverted and so find little or no support today, but his philosophy also propounds certain conceptions which are perhaps worthy of renewed attention. I refer more especially to Bergson's contrast of those two aspects of conscious experience which he terms intellect and intuition. Intellect, he argues, is the product of a gradual evolutionary process which enables the individual with increasing efficiency to select and abstract just those several features of surrounding objects which are directly relevant to the problem of evolutionary survival. In so far as it selects and abstracts, the intellect by itself can provide only a partial view of external reality. “To conquer matter,” Bergson says, “consciousness has had to exhaust the best part of its power”—it has had to “adapt itself to the habits of matter and concentrate all its attention on them, in fact, determine itself more especially as intellect.” But there remains “around our conceptual and logical thought a vague nebulosity, made of the very substance out of which has been formed the luminous nucleus which we call the intellect”. Therein reside certain powers that are complementary to the understanding—powers of intuitive recognition. Intellect is essentially based on a sort of derived symbolism gradually elaborated in the course of evolution, which serves its immediate purpose as a convenient, useful, and indeed essential device for gaining control over the material world; on the other hand intuition, according to Bergson, is capable of giving scintillating flashes of insight “into the very inwardness of life”.