bergson's conception of time. 113 



But even when Bergson starts with facts, his inferences 

 require to be received with due caution. Mr. A. J. Balfour 

 points out very justly that 



" Little importance can be attributed to the unverified virions attributed to 

 the Hvmenoptera " 



It would be a little difficult to prove that the Hymenoptera 

 suffer from any such philosophic weakness as visions. But this 

 isolated instance of poetical rather than philosophical flight would 

 not matter, if it were not accompanied by a habit of self-destruc- 

 tive inference from the facts of the present. Having postulated 

 Creative Evolution as the one true cause of all that is. he pro 

 ceeds to read the history of the present in the activity of this 

 common source of organic life. 



" Whether diverging lines of development show unlooked-for similarities or 

 puzzling discords is all one to him. Either event finds him ready ; in the first 

 case the phenomenon is simply accounted for by community of origin ; in the 

 second case it is accounted for less simply, by his doctrine that each particular 

 evolutionary road is easily overcrowded, and that if creative will insist on using it, 

 something must be dropped by the way. " * 



The latter hypothesis shows a far too intimate acquaintance 

 with the inner habits of the unnamed force which directs the 

 history of evolution, although Bergson confesses that " docu- 

 ments are lacking to reconstruct this history in detail." When 

 we come to such speculations as these, which are not unfrequent 

 in Bergson's works, the question that they suggest is this : Is 

 there any poetic or merely fanciful view of the universe that 

 could not be maintained as a philosophic system, if we were at 

 liberty to deal with our facts in this intimate and dexterous way? 



But perhaps the shortest way to get at the heart of Bergson's 

 speculations is to consider his conception of Duration. He 

 exhorts us to master this conception by promptly installing our- 

 selves in it, a thing, he says, which the intellect generally refuses 

 to do; since the intellect is always bent on some practical object 

 which can only be secured by considering the end of a process, 

 of becoming. 



" He who installs himself in becoming sees in duration the very life of things 

 the fundamental reality. The Forms which the mind isolates and stores up in 

 concept, are then only snapshots of the changing reality. They are moments 

 gathered along the course of time, and just because we have cut the thread that 

 binds them to time, they no longer endure They tend to withdraw into their own 

 definition, that is to say, into the artificial reconstruction and symbolical expression 

 which is their intellectual equivelant. They enter into eternity, if you will, but 

 that which is eternal in them is just what is unreal. On the contrary, if we treat 

 becoming by the cinematographical method, the Forms are no longer snapshots 

 taken of the change; they are its constitutive elements, they represent all that is 

 positive in Becoming." t 



This comes to mean that time, as we commonly conceive it, 

 does not exist, viz., that it is a mere self-destroying illusion, or a 

 " bastard space." There is no time that can be divided into 

 homogeneous moments. We are the victims of our imagina- 



* Balfour : Hibbert Journal, October, 1911 

 t Creative Evolution, p. 335 



t&CAl 



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