Download The Misuse of Mind By Karin Stephen Pdf book free online – from The Misuse of Mind By Karin Stephen Pdf book; If time and change are real, then, when the present is, the past simply is not.
But it is impossible to see how, in that case, there can be any relation between past and present, for a relation requires at least two terms in between which it holds, while in this case there could never be more than one term, the present, ipso facto, abolishing the past. If, on the other hand, the past is preserved, distinct from the present, then temporal relations can indeed hold between them, but in that case there is no real change nor time at all.
This dilemma all follows, of course, from regarding “past” and “present” as mutually exclusive and distinct, and requiring to be united by external relations, in short as terms in a logical series: for Bergson himself this difficulty simply does not arise since he denies that, within the actual changing fact directly known, there are any clear cut logical distinctions such as the words “past” and “present” imply. But when it comes to describing this changing fact distinct terms have to be employed because there are no others, and this creates pseudo-problems such as this question of how, assuming past and present to be distinct, the transition between them ever can be effected. The real answer is that the transition never is effected because past and present are, in fact, not distinct.
According to Bergson a very large proportion of the problems over which philosophers have been accustomed to dispute have really been pseudo-problems simply arising out of this confusion between facts and the abstractions by which we describe them. When once we have realized how they arise these pseudo-problems no longer present any difficulties; they