James’s and Bergson’s Views of the Past Compared

Abstract

For James, as well as for Bergson, the present moment is not an infinitely thin instant, but a temporally thick pulsation tinged with ‘immediate recency’. According to James, “the distinctly intuited present merges into a penumbra of mere dim recencybefore it turns into the past … which is simply reproduced and conceived”.¹In other words, there are two kinds of past for James: one directly intuitedinside of the ‘sensible present’; the second outside of the volume of the sensible present, which can be only indirectly reproduced, not immediately grasped. From this point of view recollection is not a past state at all, but merely a presentstate symbolizing or representing an event forever gone.²In this sense Taine called memory “l’illusion vraie”, because, though it deceives us in presenting a present mental state as an equivalent of the past one, it nevertheless gives us an indirect knowledge, often quite accurate, of the past.³This distinction between immediatememory (merging with the “specious” present) and indirectrecall was generally accepted by psychologists.