BERGSON S CONCEPTION OF TIME. II5 



Let us see where this intuition has led him. Here is its 

 first voyage of discovery : time is the fundamental reality by- 

 means of which the Forms which the intellect isolates and stores 

 up in concepts come to have positive constituents in being. You 

 can never reconstitute movement, he says, with these Forms. 

 But the very cinematographical nature of our intellectual 

 mechanism, which he proclaims, goes to show the very opposite. 

 You cannot create movement in the world outside the intellect 

 by means of these Forms, but surely you can obtain a perfectly 

 true idea of what this movement is, if you use the mechanism 

 properly. In speculations on movement and becoming our object 

 is not to reproduce these things, but to gain true conceptions of 

 what they are. 



Bergson places the emphasis on the wrong word of the above 

 formula, when he tells us that time is the very life of things. 

 For these Forms can be said indeed to represent much that i: 

 positive and fixed in the things themselves. But time does not 

 constitute the reality of the things that are snapshotted. It isj 

 merely the condito sine qua non of their existence and movement 

 within our experience. 



You might as truly call light the whole fundamental reality 

 of seeing as say that time is the fundamental reality of becoming. 

 If there were nothing real corresponding to our mental forms 

 which could be constituted in time, then time would be a living 

 reality which would be full of emptiness. Hence the objects 

 which the intellect snapshots, and which take the form of mental 

 pictures in the mind, are more deserving of the name of funda- 

 mental reality than any duration which may accompany them 

 cither in rerum natura or in the mind. These objects are ever 

 the foundation of such reality as time may be said to possess, 

 and so they can be said to constitute the fundamental reality of 

 time, not vice versa. 



It would seem that Bergson's next conclusion, viz., that 

 time, as a succession of homogeneous moments, is a mere delusion 

 of the imagination, has been derived rather from Berkeley and 

 Hume than through the new philosophical instrument of intui- 

 tion. It is not the average observer, but the new philosopher, 

 \>hose imagination is at fault in considering the succession of 

 time. For Bergson imagines a process of evolution in whicl" 

 the past, present, and future are so interpermeated that a 

 future state may influence the present as a cause. He con- 

 ceives, after the fashion of the Neo-Hegelians, a real mental life 

 in an eternal present (which intuition can be trained to discern), 

 where past, present and future meet in an ever-present now. 

 That this may be possible somewhere and somehow we are not 

 prepared to dery. But we can safely deny that our present 

 experience gives us any knowledge of it in the world that 

 science can examine. If, therefore, the new philosophy gets 

 rid of time in the common-sense meaning, it is postulating as 



