Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People

by Emily Herring

Picture yourself in an art gallery. After a few moments of perusing the paintings, one of them stops you in your tracks and you remain transfixed for a while. Although you are barely moving a muscle, an important transformation is taking place within you. As time passes, your appreciation of the painting expands and takes on new, indescribable forms. The longer you stare at the painting the more emotional textures, idea associations, and recollections swell up inside of you, layered on top of your initial impression. Each moment that passes is slightly different from the one immediately before. Your impression of the painting evolves as you experience it, and you will never recapture its initial impact. You could return to the gallery the next day and experience what might appear to an outside observer to be the same exact situation as before—looking at the same painting from the exact same vantage point, holding yourself in the exact same position—but the second time would not be the same as the first for the simple reason that you have lived it before.