Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Henri Bergson - Personalist (The Philosophical Review, 1912-11-01).pdf/4

№ &#93;. But we are active willing beings; and for our practical purposes, for the sake of making better use of the sense-complex which we directly perceive, we arrest (by attention) the flux of this sensational experience; we create discontinuity in this originally continuous, sensational complex. After this fashion, individual selves, Bergson teaches, constitute and distinguish first their own bodies, then other organic bodies (which they regard as sources of their own nourishment), and finally inorganic bodies. And after thus creating, for practical purposes, discrete, spatial things, they speculatively interest themselves in artificially dividing and subdividing these discontinuous units. Hence arises the discontinuous, measurable space of physicist and mathematician and, at an even farther remove from experienced reality, mathematical time.

It is thus perfectly evident that Bergson regards the human body, all other external objects, mathematical space, and measurable time as the constructions of individual selves. “Our needs,” he says, “are thus so many lighted torches which directed toward the sense-continuum outline upon it distinct objects. These needs can be satisfied only by distinguishing a body within