CONTINUITY OF BERGSON'S THOUGHT 189 



can come to a thoroughly spatiahzed or geometrical regularity; second, 

 pure duration, which comes as near as reality can come to a thor- 

 oughly original creative and spiritual freedom. Actual experiences 

 never coincide with either extreme, and what we call "disorder" is 

 the result of the mingling of the geometrical with the vital order. 



In physical nature, seen as the field of natural law, the laws of 

 physics and chemistry, we get a close approximation to absolute 

 geometrical determinism, although the laws of natural science, such 

 as the law of gravitation, the laws of heat and light, etc., are really 

 not absolutely correct statements of the uniformities they profess to 

 generalize; just because nature is, even where inert matter is most 

 dominant, not quite free from growth, change and original and unfore- 

 seeable directions. Nature never quite steps out of duration into 

 pure space. 



We think of disorder as a negation of order in the absolute sense; 

 but the most confused ideas arise from this blunder. Disorder is not 

 the absence of order, but the confusion of different orders. A room is 

 in disorder not because it has no order but because its conventional 

 order has become mixed up with the psychological order of its peculiar 

 occupant. And the room of nature is found disorderly when it fails 

 to coincide with the moral and voluntary conception of order of the 

 human being that confronts it. For example, rock from a cliff may 

 fall in perfect accord with the laws of cohesion and vibration and 

 gravitation, and may cripple and disable or even kill a man walking 

 on the beach, who does not in any reading of the moral or voluntary 

 law of his spiritual nature seem to have incurred the disaster as a 

 penalty of his act. The confusion of these orders would seem to 

 suggest a complete negation of order ; but it is not a case of complete 

 absence of order but rather a case of too much order not fully under- 

 stood or reconciled from any one clear point of view. 



Some of the phenomena of nature which we now regard as typical 

 examples of original, creative evolution seemed to the ancients to be 

 perfect types of the static regularity of the world. Animal genera 

 are now regarded as steps in a constant unforeseeable development, 

 yet the generations of animals were so much alike, when seen by any 



