1 88 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



is the world in its reality as a great creative evolution of the kind that 

 science discovers. 



If the intellect were really able to support the pretensions of its 

 extreme advocates, one would suppose that just because it is intellect 

 it would be particularly at home and successful in dealing with 

 moral problems. But it is well known that just here it scores nothing 

 but failure. A true science of conduct would aim at foretelling con- 

 duct as astronomy foretells eclipses; but science is perfectly useless 

 in foretelling the conduct of others or even of ourselves. As long as 

 the intellect deals with space and spatialized time, or any experience 

 that will stay fixed in a geometrical plan of things, it does marvels. 

 But let life intervene, and where is it? "It is duration that puts 

 spikes in its guns." (C'est la duree qui met des batons dans les roues) 



Deduction and induction are the two essential functions of intel- 

 lect, and neither of them works except when they are based upon spatial 

 intuition. Induction seems at first sight to be a true logic of events 

 and of living experience, but it really ignores creative life as much as 

 deduction, and prospers by assuming that time works no real changes, 

 and that what happened yesterday will happen again tomorrow. 



Bergson now proceeds to inquire into the meaning of "physical 

 laws," and this inquiry leads to the investigation of the meaning 

 of the words "order" and "disorder," "laws and genera" and to 

 suggestions as to what matter must have ultimately meant in evolu- 

 tion. These considerations lead up to his great conception of the 

 real meaning of evolution with which the chapter ends. 



In these pages, we find the subtlest and most characteristic of the 

 fundamental thoughts of Bergson's philosophy. Matter stands at 

 one limit of our experience:, it is the nearest possible approach to the 

 geometrical, as opposed to the vital or voluntary, ordering of reality. 

 Astronomical phenomena show an admirable order in the regularity 

 of their occurrence ; there is an order no less admirable in a symphony 

 by Beethoven, but the one is mechanical and foreseeable, while the 

 other is original and unforeseeable. 



All experiences are arrangements between these two ideal points 

 of classification: first, pure mechanism, which comes as near as reality 



