Note 109 — Chapter I

The attitude, that is, of intuition, which we have called the temporal attitude. The terms “spatial,” “logical,” “conceptual,” applied here so often to the word “thought,” are epithets of thought generally. There is no thought, in any meaning of the word more specific than “consciousness,” that is not logical, conceptual and spatial in this Bergsonian sense.

If we cannot conceptualize our psychic facts, we cannot think them, then—the meaning is the same. But if we say that anything (which we name and, in the saying, define and think) is unnamable, indefinable and cannot be thought, we contradict ourselves. The doctrine, if true, must mean something that is not a self-contradiction. Does it mean that what we name and discourse about is only the spatialized symbol of the psychic fact? There can be little doubt. I think, that this is Bergson’s meaning; but then the psychic fact is of such a nature as to be symbolized; and the distinction between a symbol and a name, by virtue of which a thing which can be symbolized may not be namable, requires explanation.