18 UNIVERSAL EVOLUTION 



the marks of the flux, and are so constantly changing 

 that they are of little importance compared with the 

 real movement. It is much like the theory that the 

 invisible ether is the hard unchanging, unimpressible 

 substance of nature, and those forms, like the earth, 

 which we have been calling the solids, the immutables, 

 are really the mutable, the changing, the mobile part of 

 nature. The movement is the reality, and not the forms. 

 The latter are in constant evolution, by a change, and 

 their morphology is governed by the "vital impetus" in- 

 herent in the movement of the whole. The creative prin- 

 ciple is the movement itself. But man has been looking 

 at the forms only, and founding his theory upon them, 

 calling them matter. The changes in these he calls 

 "time." Bergson says "The forms, which the mind 

 isolates and stores up in concepts, are then only snap- 

 shots of the changing reality." Yet they are the only 

 parts of the general flux perceptible to the senses, and 

 thus the conception of man must be made up from their 

 qualities. 



"It will be found that form is essentially extended, 

 inseparable, as it is, from the extensity of the becoming, 

 which materialized it in the course of its flow. Every 

 form thus occupies space as it occupies time." But 

 the philosophy of "Ideas" follows the inverse direction. 

 It starts from the form; it sees in the form the very 

 essence of reality. 



There is a creative evolution of forms, and may be of 

 matter and motion, but Bergson does not prove it in- 

 ductively, he merely states it metaphysically. He drifts 

 into the most radical statements of metaphysical 

 idealism. We know nothing of a "Vital Impetus," nor 

 of a vital principle, nor of a real cause. We know only 

 what is apparent through the senses, and this is what he 



