148 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



Creative Evolution twenty times over with the greatest concentration 

 and yet fail to get his meaning. This is because in his first two 

 books he spends much time and effort on the establishment of certain 

 peculiar meanings for certain common words, such as time, matter, 

 extension, perception, intensity, space; and only those who follow those 

 explanations can clearly comprehend his ideas of creative evolution. 



No reader expects to understand the problems of the infinitesimal 

 calculus without reading the mathematics leading to it, and so in 

 other studies a propaedeutic discipline is conceded necessary without 

 question. One purpose of this paper is to show the unity of Bergson's 

 thought, and to make it clear to readers of his last great work that 

 while some pages of it are abstruse, they are not obscure to those who 

 really desire to pay the very moderate price of reading his earlier 

 works with reasonable care and attention. 



Well, now, what is it in general that Bergson has done ? In his 

 first book, begun when he was twenty-three or twenty-four, he attacks 

 a subject which has baffled the greatest thinkers since Augustine, and 

 slays the dragon of determinism by giving a new idea of what freedom 

 really might mean. If his numerous admirers are to be believed, he 

 has put an end forever to the wide-spreading dry-rot which a mate- 

 rialistic psychology was imposing upon the will of man by identifying 

 the movements of matter in the form of brain-cells with the modifica- 

 tions of thought and feeling which do in some way run parallel to 

 them. Any reader who doubts the importance of this problem should 

 read books like Loeb's Physiology of the Brain, where it is repeatedly 

 stated that mental phenomena are absolutely determined by physical 

 and chemical causes. Kuelpe in his Introduction to Philosophy advises 

 that in science we hold to determinism, while in law, morals and 

 pedagogy we believe in the freedom of the will. One eminent English 

 moralist thinks we may conquer the realm of ethics without settling 

 the free-will question, leaving it like an impregnable fortress in the 

 rear. 



Bergson sees clearly that if the will is not free, if we can really 

 originate nothing, there is no use going farther. We should feel out 

 of touch with our base of supplies. You cannot praise, blame, scold, 



