Originally published in 1920. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Bergson is brilliant, and he is in close touch with the life of men. He is always worth reading for his intellectual strength and his insight into things spiritual. In this book Bergson is found at his best.”–Boston Transcript
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
psychological science,
By
This review is from: Mind-energy, lectures and essays (Paperback)
Bringing on our future.
Our science has been slow to respond to the tendencies of parasites to form institutions maintaining themselves, like animals which have become parasitic on other organisms and have no need of moving about to find their own nourishment. I found this idea early in the book Mind-Energy (1920), an English translation of lectures and essays by Henri Bergson translated by H. Wildon Carr. The book starts with a mention of Huxley, a naturalist who was also a philosopher, for the threefold problem of consciousness, of life and of their relation. Energy has been slowly borrowed from the sun by plants. Animals feed on plants or on other animals in order to have energy to release. Evolution has the support of comparative anatomy, of embryology, and of paleontology. Bergson would like life to take: ever greater and greater risks towards its goal of an ever higher and higher efficiency (p. 24). It is earth's hidden fire which appears at the summit of the volcano. (p. 32). The second lecture, delivered April 28, 1912, is called The Soul and the Body. Bergson is concerned about stopping points: The idea is a halt of thought; it arises when the thinking, instead of continuing its own train, makes a pause or is reflected back on itself. (p. 55). The work of the brain is to the whole of conscious life what the movements of the conductor's baton are to the orchestral symphony. (p. 58). Let us say, if you will, that the brain is the organ of attention to life. (p. 59). The more we become accustomed to this idea of a consciousness overflowing the organism, the more natural we find it to suppose that the soul survives the body. (p. 97). Bergson's lecture on Dreams, March 20, 1901, might be compared to an analysis suggested by Freud in the book he had recently published in German. According to Bergson: Your life in the waking state is, then, a life of toil, even when you suppose you are doing nothing, for at every moment you must choose and you must exclude. You choose among your sensations, since you reject from consciousness a host of "subjective" sensations which reappear when you sleep. You choose among your memories, since you reject every recollection which does not mould itself on your present state. This choice which you are continually accomplishing, this adaptation ceaselessly renewed, is the essential condition of what you call common sense. But such adaptation and choice keeps you in a state of uninterrupted tension. (p. 125). Consciousness, I said, is better balanced the tenser its concentration on action, and more unstable the more it is detended in a kind of dream. (p. 147). The patient, puzzled at finding that his perception is incompletely real, and therefore incompletely present, hardly knows if he is dealing with the present or the past or even with the future. (p. 148). Crimes against humor have to do a tremendous amount of work to express something so vividly that the tension maintained by common sense goes out the window. Psychic deficiencies become obvious: In order to define these states we simply have to indicate what has disappeared from consciousness. They consist in an absence. We all agree in seeing in them a psychic deficiency. (p. 151). An article on creative tension called Intellectual Effort was published in 1902. The movement of ideas to fix a group of impressions is likely to attempt to become a work of art in modern society because commercial success is much more likely in contemporary American fiction, drama, or the motion pictures than any other kind of scheme. Memory is not likely to bring a complex organization that thwarts every attempt to comprehend itself to what Bergson calls: responding automatically by an appropriate act. (p. 203). The fact is that it is the memory which makes us see and hear, and the perception is incapable by itself of evoking the memory which resembles it, because, to do that, it must have already taken form and itself be complete; now, it only becomes complete and acquires a distinct form through that very memory, which skips into it and provides most of its content. (p. 207). I have reached an age at which considering a new form of philosophy is difficult, but the political struggles are easy to picture as a result of a series of mistakes setting up tremendous repudiations for a future that coincides with the retirement of Americans my age. Having an interpretation of events which is unacceptable to the people who obtain power in a system running on the marginal thinking of millionaires and billionaires who thrive on rolling in money that has a big downside when no lockbox has the Social Security trust fund and every political idea has to include tax cuts might be like a song from the Freak Out album by the Mothers of Invention. There's no way to delay that trouble coming every day.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Inside This Book
(learn more)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Listmania!
|
|
