V GENERAL CONCEPT OF HOLISM 93 



depths of subjective experience until he comes to the point 

 where we feel ourselves most intimately within our own life. 

 He divests this experience of all elements of change or differ- 

 entiated features, all subjective and objective items of ex- 

 perience are eliminated, and there remains the bare flow 

 or passage of the inner life. This is Duration; this homo- 

 geneous flow or passage is for him the creative principle in 

 the universe. It underlies and generates our idea of time. 

 But time is not pure Duration, it has become infected with 

 the Intellect, and instead of being a continuous enduring 

 process it has become a summation of units, or points, or 

 small unit lengths of happening. In other words, time has 

 become spatialised, analytical and arithmetical in character 

 in proportion as it has become divorced from its original 

 pure form as uniform flow or process or Duration. This crea- 

 tive Duration is the tap-root not only of time, but also of 

 Evolution, and is the source of all the multiplicity of forms 

 and activities which we see in the universe. Bergson's 

 Creative Evolution is an attempt to show how this funda- 

 mental principle beginning as nothing but bare flow or pas- 

 sage builds up the concrete universe within us and around us. 

 To him belongs the signal merit of having elucidated the 

 concept of Time more clearly than has been done before 

 in philosophy. The theory of Evolution has made the 

 aspect of time in the universe more important than ever 

 before, and Bergson has rescued the concept of time from 

 the confusions in which it had become entangled, not only 

 in our empirical experience, but even in our scientific and 

 philosophic ideas. But while freely conceding this great 

 merit to Bergson I must confess- that I fail to see how from 

 pure Duration he has produced concrete reality. It simply 

 cannot be done. From bare, undifferentiated, homogeneous 

 unity you cannot reach out to multiplicity. You may call 

 pure Duration creative, but it will create nothing until it is 

 mixed with something very different from itself. And 

 indeed Bergson has had to summon to his rescue another 

 principle, which he has invested with all the characters of 

 which he had so carefully deprived Duration. This is the 



