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THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM
The word free ought to be applied exclusively to an event which is absolutely undetermined, that is to say to an event which is neither determined by the medium, nor by the past of history of the thing in which it occurs, nor by the essence of that thing. Berson uses the word "liberté" in this sense. . . .
The problem of radical indeterminims may be discussed in a general or in a particular way, i.e,, either cosmologically or psychologically.
(Hans Driesch, The Crisis in Psychology, London, Princeton, 1925, p. 243.).
... I never can have the very same content a second or third time, because, by its having been had already, it is made different from what it was the first time ! For the second or any subsequent time, that content carries in itself two accents : one of before and another of already known which it did not carry when it was possessed first. Thus every content is exclusively what it is and there cannot be two quite identical contents.
Our theory of accents acquires its greatest importance here. What I consciously possess in the now bears an enormous number of accents of two different kinds. Firstly, it embraces, in the form of accents of being settled, everything which I have had before with regard to its content ; and, secondly, it refers to all accents of the form before. Each accent enters into the other.
It seems a paradox, but it is none the less true, that in the now I always have implicitly my whole former psychic life. There is not a temporal continuity in my "having," as we shall see see later on ; but there is a continuity or penetration of contents. This is what Berson calls durée, it seems to me.
But does not psychology become absolutely helpless in the face of these astonishing facts? Are its general conditions not far more full of difficulties than those of the sciences of nature? For in spatial nature every single state or event differs from every other only insofar as each occupies its special locality in space and time, while in psychical life every content is only itself with regard to quality.
(Hans Driesch, The Crisis in Psychology, London, Princeton, 1925, pp. 24-26).
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Bergson, so far as I understand him, does not assume that the brain is more than a system of connections, and calls it an organ of "attitude." I recommend most intensively the thorough study of his Matière et Memoire one of the profoundest, it not the profoundest, book of modern psychology.
(Hans Driesch, The Crisis in Psychology, London, Princeton, 1925, pp. 154-56.).
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