Of the oddity of inventing as a remedy for the inconveniences resulting from this situation a supernumerary conceptual object called an absolute, into which you pack the self-same contradictions unreduced, I will say something in the next lecture.  The absolute is said to perform its feats by taking up its other into itself.  But that is exactly what is done when every individual morsel of the sensational stream takes up the adjacent morsels by coalescing with them.  This is just what we mean by the stream’s sensible continuity.  No element there cuts itself off from any other element, as concepts cut themselves from concepts.  No part there is so small as not to be a place of conflux.  No part there is not really next its neighbors; which means that there is literally nothing between; which means again that no part goes exactly so far and no farther; that no part absolutely excludes another, but that they compenetrate and are cohesive; that if you tear out one, its roots bring out more with them; that whatever is real is telescoped and diffused into other reals; that, in short, every minutest thing is already its hegelian ‘own other,’ in the fullest sense of the term.

Of course this sounds self-contradictory, but as the immediate facts don’t sound at all, but simply are, until we conceptualize and name them vocally, the contradiction results only from the conceptual or discursive form being substituted for the real form.  But if, as Bergson shows, that form is superimposed for practical ends only, in order to let us jump about over life instead of wading through it; and if it cannot even pretend to reveal anything of what life’s inner nature is or ought to be; why then we can turn a deaf ear to its accusations.  The resolve to turn the deaf ear is the inner crisis or ‘catastrophe’ of which M. Bergson’s disciple whom I lately quoted spoke.  We are so subject to the philosophic tradition which treats logos or discursive thought generally as the sole avenue to truth, that to fall back on raw unverbalized life as more of a revealer, and to think of concepts as the merely practical things which Bergson calls them, comes very hard.  It is putting off our proud maturity of mind and becoming again as foolish little children in the eyes of reason.  But difficult as such a revolution is, there is no other way, I believe, to the possession of reality, and I permit myself to hope that some of you may share my opinion after you have heard my next lecture.

LECTURE VII

THE CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE