CONTINUITY OF BERGSON S THOUGHT 1 99 



what is really a living transition. Quality, form, design are the 

 scaffolding of the intellect, but they have no real place in the house 

 of life. 



It is not only the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, but the whole 

 science of Greece that we find perverted by intellectualism : the physics, 

 the cosmology and even the theology of their world deal with stales 

 instead of growth. What wonder if a genuine philosophy, a creative 

 evolution was postponed for two thousand years ? 



All Philosophers Have Overrated Intellect 



Bergson thus completes his philosophy of creative evolution by a 

 criticism of the whole history of philosophic thought. From his 

 point of view, the great thinkers are Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus 

 in the ancient world; Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant in the 

 modern period; and Spencer in the most recent times. There 

 have been many reviews of philosophy. Aristotle and Augustine 

 have given reactions on the systems of their predecessors. Hegel's 

 History of Philosophy is the first great modern attempt at evaluating 

 the progress of thought from an independent point of view, and nowa- 

 days the works of Erdmann, Ueberweg and Windelband are the most 

 generally esteemed accounts of the evolution of philosophy. But 

 Bergson's last fifty pages differ from all these in viewing the whole 

 development from a unique plane. He sets out to show that while 

 these systems are different from one another, and show interesting 

 and wonderful progress, they are all tarred with the same stick of 

 intellectualism, and that none of them freed itself from a slavish con- 

 ception of reality. He realizes that Kant and Spencer are nearer to 

 a philosophy of durationism than earlier thinkers, but just for this 

 reason he attacks them more fiercely for having turned aside from the 

 true direction of speculative thought. If Bergson is right, all these 

 systems are enslaved by the triumphs of intellectual science, the whole 

 history of philosophy must be rewritten and criticized from a new 

 and different point of view, and the future of philosophy must be 

 marked by the acceptance of intuitionism and durationism as central 

 ideas. The direction of philosophy must be as distinct from that of 



