194 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



carried in its integrity to higher refinements and potencies. Conscience, 

 personality, a higher soul, immortality are aspects of the spirit, or 

 should be considered heedfully; but science would crush them all to powder 

 by its mechanisms and necessity and fatalism, if we do not rise to a true 

 vision of their real origin in a source deeper than the intellect and prior 

 to science and opposed to matter. The density of consciousness is not 

 bound up with the brain; the psychic world can realize itself in many 

 ways. It is in life alone that we can find a philosophy of life. Such a 

 view genuinely believed and lived would give us a renewed power to act 

 and to live, a new valuation of all we experience. "All the living hold 

 together and all yield to the same tremendous push." "The whole of 

 humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army, galloping beside 

 and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge, able to 

 beat down every resistance, and clear the most formidable obstacles, per- 

 haps even death." This Bergson conceives to be the carrier of the elan 

 vital and the meaning of creative evolution. 



The History of Philosophy Needs Rewriting 



In the last chapter of "Creative Evolution," Bergson shows at 

 considerable length how a philosophy which "sees in duration the 

 very stuff of reality" must regard the principal attempts at meta- 

 physics from Plato and Aristotle to our own day. 



How do all these systems explain the origin, creation and develop- 

 ment of the world ? They are all preoccupied with the question, How 

 could the world have originated out of nothing ? 



The intellect, as we have often seen, can do nothing with really 

 living things. The mobile must halt for an instant in order to be 

 fixed by law. For practical purposes the intervals are negligible. 

 But when intellect undertakes to speculate about reality, it forgets 

 that these intervals are not real intervals, just as it forgot that dis- 

 order is really a confusion of orders. The word "nothing" has been 

 used like the word "disorder " as if it really signified something; but in 

 life, in duration, it has no place: it is only for intellect and practical 

 control that the void is useful. Existence comes to appear as a 

 conquest over non-existence, whereas in fact non-existence has no 



