CONTINUITY OF BERGSON S THOUGHT 191 



life is felt in our greatest and freest moments to be driving into a future at 

 once unforeseen and unforeseeable. A simple arrest of this movement 

 throws us back upon the dead past, and this arrest is the ideal genesis of 

 matter. The atom bears the relation to reality that the letters bear to 

 the poem. The real universe is not created but constantly being created. 



If energy really belonged to matter in the spatialized sense, we 

 could hardly escape the conclusions of the law of the conservation of 

 energy; but perhaps it is precisely in extraspatial phenomena that 

 energy resides. God may be seen as having nothing of the already-made. 

 "He is unceasing life, action, freedom; creation so conceived is not 

 mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely." "Action 

 increases as it goes on; it grows and creates in the measure of its 

 advance, as we learn by watching ourselves in action. Life is a 

 movement; materiality is the inverse movement; when they clash, 

 we get organization." 



We must try to see "no longer with the eyes of the intellect alone, 

 but with the spirit — the faculty of seeing which is immanent in the faculty 

 of acting.'" What we shall see is not a complex intellectual scheme, 

 but a simple process, "an action which is making itself across an action 

 which is unmaking itself like the fiery path which is torn by the last 

 rocket of a fireworks display through the black cinders of the spent 

 rockets which are falling dead." 



From this point of view, let us now proceed to inquire what is 

 essential in a theory of evolution. 



In the beginning is the elan vital with its need of creation. But 

 opposed to this upward movement is inert matter forming an obstacle. 

 We thus find the psychic world with its desire for freedom checked 

 by the material world with its opposing necessity. 



The elan vital is limited and finite and can conquer necessity only 

 by patience and cunning. In this dualism, Bergson seems to regard 

 matter as thwarting life and freedom, and while this suggests a 

 mediaeval and unscientific attitude, it has the great advantage of 

 agreeing with common experience, where all our wits are exerted in 

 overcoming the nature elements, getting food and shelter and thus 

 freeing us for thought and art. 



