CONTINUITY OF BERGSON S THOUGHT 1 97 



Bergson is not given to clear enunciations of his proofs. We may 

 suppose that in beginning his last chapter of the "Creative Evolution," 

 he desired to reply to those who might ask, How did the world begin ? 

 How could any evolution arise out of nothing? He replies that 

 reality has nothing to do with "nothing": there never was and never 

 could be any such idea except as a pseudo-idea, and he does not waste 

 further time on the resulting pseudo-difficulty. 



He next proceeds to show how his conception of reality as duration 

 enables him to see the whole history oj philosophy from the Eleatics 

 to Spencer in a new light. It is all wrong so far as it concerns the 

 real nature of life and its development. Life can be apprehended 

 from the side of instinct and of intuition, but not from that of intellect. 

 It is not that intellectual philosophy has not worked hard and thought 

 profoundly, but that it is on the wrong track entirely. It is only by 

 turning away from its very nature, intellectualism, that it can free 

 itself from hopeless inconsistency. All its vaunted consistency is 

 found within systems based on a fundamental axiomatic error. Life 

 is too much alive to fit into intellectual forms. 



The whole criticism which follows may be summed up in one 

 statement. Life is dynamic; all the systems of all the schools, 

 including Spencer and the modern evolutionists, are radically and 

 hopelessly static. 



Bergson here returns to his earliest works. Nowhere is the con- 

 tinuity of his thought more startling. But what was at first -a, criti- 

 cism of determinism, mechanism, and the associationist psychology, 

 has now grown to be a criticism of all accounts of reality, Greek, 

 Renaissance or Modern, and not only a destructive criticism but a 

 bold and positive contrary hypothesis. 



All the schools have treated experience as if it could be pinned 

 down for investigation. Some of them are very crude descriptions, in 

 which becoming is simply ignored or even ridiculed as unthinkable. 

 Others are subtle and even make a pretense of asserting becoming as 

 the real soul of things. But none of them grasps pure duration as 

 life, soul, mind and reality; and contrasts it with form, essence, 

 quality and geometry, which are mere convenient modes of action. 



