i 4 SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 



of the future for the impulsion of the past. But suc- 

 cession remains none the less a mere appearance, as 

 indeed does movement itself. In the doctrine of Leibniz, 

 time is reduced to a confused perception, relative to 

 the human standpoint, a perception which would vanish, 

 like a rising mist, for a mind seated at the centre of 

 things. 



" Yet finalism is not, like mechanism, a doctrine with 

 fixed rigid outlines. It admits of as many inflections as 

 we like. The mechanistic philosophy is to be taken or 

 left : it must be left if the least grain of dust, by straying 

 from the path foreseen by mechanics, should show the 

 slightest trace of spontaneity. The doctrine of final 

 causes, on the contrary, will never be definitively refuted. 

 If one form of it be put aside, it will take another. Its 

 principle, which is essentially psychological, is very 

 flexible. It is so extensible, and thereby so com- 

 prehensive, that one accepts something of it as soon as 

 one rejects pure mechanism. The theory we shall put 

 forward in this book will therefore necessarily partake of 

 finalism to a certain extent." 



M. Bergson's form of finalism depends upon his con- 

 ception of life. Life, in his philosophy, is a continuous 

 stream, in which all divisions are artificial and unreal. 

 Separate things, beginnings and endings, are mere con- 

 venient fictions : there is only smooth, unbroken transi- 

 tion. The beliefs of to-day may count as true to-day, 

 if they carry us along the stream ; but to-morrow they 

 will be false, and must be replaced by new beliefs to 

 meet the new situation. All our thinking consists of 

 convenient fictions, imaginary congealings of the stream : 

 reality flows on in spite of all our fictions, and though it 

 can be lived, it cannot be conceived in thought. Some- 

 how, without explicit statement, the assurance is slipped 



