16 UNIVERSAL EVOLUTION 



CREATIVE EVOLUTION. Bergson's observations upon 

 Spencer's definition of evolution is, that Spencer takes 

 things already evolved, and patches them together to 

 prove evolution. It is using the thing to be proved, as 

 evidence of the process. But Spencer does not hold that 

 the atom, or the ultimate unit is either evolved, or 

 created. The human intellect cannot account for matter 

 and motion. So the evolutionist begins with matter and 

 motion, and by following the integrations and dissipa- 

 tions of them, in the growth of vegetable and animal 

 forms, and their decay, delineates, what the intellect per- 

 ceives, in the method. That is a sensory and mechan- 

 istic evolution. But Bergson is not satisfied with that 

 procedure. He says, that is correct for intellect. But in- 

 tellect acts only on matter. He desires to go behind mat- 

 ter, and for the purpose evokes intuition, as something 

 superior to intellect to penetrate beneath or through 

 matter to the flux. Intuition divines a "vital impetus" 

 which gives direction to the life process, which is always 

 a becoming, a creative evolution. Forms are only the 

 emphasized points of this supposed flux of life through 

 matter, the latter being the negative of life. Matter only 

 degrades, or impedes the creative movement. The anti 

 intellectualism of Bergson has received considerable ap- 

 proval in France, and perhaps in other countries, 

 because, heretofore in the 18th and 19th centuries met- 

 aphysical, and other philosophers, derided materialism, 

 and neglected it. Matter has been looked upon, as 

 Bergson regards it, as a degradation. Mentality was 

 not regarded as the product of physiology. It is only of 

 late years, that the brain has been given, by a few 

 psychologists, as the substrate of mentality, while he 

 who thought as Hume and Huxley and Biichner did upon 

 this problem, was more or less isolated in the belief of the 



