The Greatest Works of Henri Bergson. Henri Bergson
your mind when you transform the intensity of the sound into a magnitude. Wundt17 has drawn attention to the quite special connexions of vocal and auditory nervous filaments which are met with in the human brain. And has it not been said that to hear is to speak to oneself? Some neuropaths cannot be present at a conversation without moving their lips; this is only an exaggeration of what takes place in the case of every one of us. How will the expressive or rather suggestive power of music be explained, if not by admitting that we repeat to ourselves the sounds heard, so as to carry ourselves back into the psychic state out of which they emerged, an original state, which nothing will express, but which something may suggest, viz., the very motion and attitude which the sound imparts to our body?
Intensity and pitch. The part played by muscular effort.
Thus, when we speak of the intensity of a sound of medium force as a magnitude, we allude principally to the greater or less effort which we should have ourselves to expend in order to summon, by our own effort, the same auditory sensation.
Now, besides the intensity, we distinguish another characteristic property of the sound, its pitch. Are the differences in pitch, such as our ear perceives, quantitative differences? I grant that a sharper sound calls up the picture of a higher position in space. But does it follow from this that the notes of the scale, as auditory sensations, differ otherwise than in quality? Forget what you have learnt from physics, examine carefully your idea of a higher or lower note, and see whether you do not think simply of the greater or less effort which the tensor muscle of your vocal chords has to make in order to produce the note? As the effort by which your voice passes from one note to another is discontinuous, you picture to yourself these successive notes as points in space, to be reached by a series of sudden jumps, in each of which you cross an empty separating interval: this is why you establish intervals between the notes of the scale. Now, why is the line along which we dispose them vertical rather than horizontal, and why do we say that the sound ascends in some cases and descends in others? It must be remembered that the high notes seem to us to produce some sort of resonance in the head and the deep notes in the thorax: this perception, whether real or illusory, has undoubtedly had some effect in making us reckon the intervals vertically. But we must also notice that the greater the tension of the vocal chords in the chest voice, the greater is the surface of the body affected, if the singer is inexperienced; this is just the reason why the effort is felt by him as more intense. And as he breathes out the air upwards, he will attribute the same direction to the sound produced by the current of air; hence the sympathy of a larger part of the body with the vocal muscles will be represented by a movement upwards. We shall thus say that the note is higher because the body makes an effort as though to reach an object which is more elevated in space. In this way it became customary to assign a certain height to each note of the scale, and as soon as the physicist was able to define it by the number of vibrations in a given time to which it corresponds, we no longer hesitated to declare that our ear perceived differences of quantity directly. But the sound would remain a pure quality if we did not bring in the muscular effort which produces it or the vibrations which explain it.
The sensations of heat and cold. These soon become affective and are measured by reactions called forth.
The experiments of Blix, Goldscheider and Donaldson18 have shown that the points on the surface of the body which feel cold are not the same as those which feel heat. Physiology is thus disposed to set up a distinction of nature, and not merely of degree, between the sensations of heat and cold. But psychological observation goes further, for close attention can easily discover specific differences between the different sensations of heat, as also between the sensations of cold. A more intense heat is really another kind of heat. We call it more intense because we have experienced this same change a thousand times when we approached nearer and nearer a source of heat, or when a growing surface of our body was affected by it. Besides, the sensations of heat and cold very quickly become affective and incite us to more or less marked reactions by which we measure their external cause: hence, we are inclined to set up similar quantitative differences among the sensations which correspond to lower intensities of the cause. But I shall not insist any further; every one must question himself carefully on this point, after making a clean sweep of everything which his past experience has taught him about the cause of his sensations and coming face to face with the sensations themselves. The result of this examination is likely to be as follows: it will be perceived that the magnitude of a representative sensation depends on the cause having been put into the effect, while the intensity of the affective element depends on the more or less important reactions which prolong the external stimulations and find their way into the sensation itself.
The sensation of pressure and weight measured by extent of organism affected.
The same thing will be experienced in the case of pressure and even weight. When you say that a pressure on your hand becomes stronger, see whether you do not mean that there first was a contact, then a pressure, afterwards a pain, and that this pain itself, after having gone through a series of qualitative changes, has spread further and further over the surrounding region. Look again and see whether you do not bring in the more and more intense, i.e. more and more extended, effort of resistance which you oppose to the external pressure. When the psychophysicist lifts a heavier weight, he experiences, he says, an increase of sensation. Examine whether this increase of sensation ought not rather to be called a sensation of increase. The whole question is centred in this, for in the first case the sensation would be a quantity like its external cause, whilst in the second it would be a quality which had become representative of the magnitude of its cause. The distinction between the heavy and the light may seem to be as old-fashioned and as childish as that between the hot and the cold. But the very childishness of this distinction makes it a psychological reality. And not only do the heavy and the light impress our consciousness as generically different, but the various degrees of lightness and heaviness are so many species of these two genera. It must be added that the difference of quality is here translated spontaneously into a difference of quantity, because of the more or less extended effort which our body makes in order to lift a given weight. Of this you will soon become aware if you are asked to lift a basket which, you are told, is full of scrap-iron, whilst in fact there is nothing in it. You will think you are losing your balance when you catch hold of it, as though distant muscles had interested themselves beforehand in the operation and experienced a sudden disappointment. It is chiefly by the number and nature of these sympathetic efforts, which take place at different points of the organism, that you measure the sensation of weight at a given point; and this sensation would be nothing more than a quality if you did not thus introduce into it the idea of a magnitude. What strengthens the illusion on this point is that we have become accustomed to believe in the immediate perception of a homogeneous movement in a homogeneous space. When I lift a light weight with my arm, all the rest of my body remaining motionless, I experience a series of muscular sensations each of which has its "local sign," its peculiar shade: it is this series which my consciousness interprets as a continuous movement in space. If I afterwards lift a heavier weight to the same height with the same speed, I pass through a new series of muscular sensations, each of which differs from the corresponding term of the preceding series. Of this I could easily convince myself by examining them closely. But as I interpret this new series also as a continuous movement, and as this movement has the same direction, the same duration and the same velocity as the preceding, my consciousness feels itself bound to localize the difference between the second series of sensations and the first elsewhere than in the movement itself. It thus materializes this difference at the extremity of the arm which moves; it persuades itself that the sensation of movement has been identical in both cases, while the sensation of weight differed in magnitude. But movement and weight are but distinctions of the reflective consciousness: what is present to consciousness immediately is the sensation of, so to speak, a heavy movement, and this sensation itself can be resolved by analysis into a series of muscular sensations, each of which represents by its shade its place of origin and by its colour the magnitude of the weight lifted.
The sensation of light. Qualitative changes of colour interpreted as quantitative changes in intensity of luminous source.
Shall we call the intensity