Note 405 — Chapter IX · PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON386

To Bergson concepts are just as hypothetical in the realm of science, as they are to thinkers like Mach and Poincaré, and Professor Ward of Cambridge. See the following, for example, from Matter and Memory (p. 263): “We shall never explain by means of particles, whatever these may be, the simple properties of matter; at most we can thus follow out into corpuscles as artificial as the corpus, the body itself—the actions and reactions of this body with regard to all the others. This is precisely the object of chemistry. It studies bodies rather than matter; and so we understand why it stops at the atom, which is still endowed with the general properties of matter. But the materiality of the atom dissolves more and more under the eyes of the physicist. We have no reason, for instance, for representing the atom to ourselves as a solid, rather than as a liquid or gaseous, nor for picturing the reciprocal action of atoms by shocks rather than in any other way.” Or, the following characteristic passage from the same book (p. 280) in respect of the hypothetical character of the concepts of “pure time” and “pure space”: “Homogeneous space and homogeneous time are then neither properties of things nor essential conditions of our faculty of knowing them; they express, in an abstract form, the double work of solidification and of division, which we effect on the moving continuity of the real in order to obtain there a fulcrum for our action, in order to fix within it starting-points for our operation, in short, to introduce into it real changes. They are the diagrammatic designs of our eventual action upon matter.”