Professor Henri Bergson’s Biology. 89 
and greater risks in order to arrive at greater and greater efficiency ?” 
“T think it is hard to survey the whole of the evolution of life without 
the impression that this impulse is a reality.” 
What is the nature of this vital impulse? “An impulse towards a 
higher and higher efficiency, something which ever seeks to transcend itself, 
to extract from itself more than there is—in a word, to create.” Negatively, 
ib is something that cannot be expressed in the abstractions used in 
formulating physical events, something that is missed when we use these 
abstractions in the organic realm. Positively, it partakes of the nature 
of consciousness. 
SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS. 
Let us call a halt and see where we are. When Bergson suggests that a 
specific hormone liberated from a modified organ may affect the germ-cells 
and thus influence the offspring in a definite way, he is making an interesting 
biological hypothesis. When he elaborates his contrast between plants and 
animals he touches the highwater mark of biological exposition. To give 
a thrill of fresh interest to that tedious topic is genius. To bring into 
relief the great steps in evolution and to appraise the merits of the 
various theories of evolution, that is all within the rubric of science. 
When he goes on to show, both directly and indirectly, that the 
concepts and formule that suffice for a description of the inanimate world, 
and for a practical mastery of it too, do not suffice for the animate world 
(though they apply of course), then he is dealing, surely, with a question of 
scientific method. 
Furthermore, when he insists that we cannot give an effective account 
-of the behaviour of even a Protozoon, or of the everyday life of either 
frog or stork, or of the general evolution of organisms, without recognising 
the role of consciousness, not as a phosphorescence on protoplasm, but as 
a reality that counts, he is still, surely, discussing scientific method. When 
he goes on to show that the conventional frames used in the intellectual 
construetions of biology cannot be regarded as quite satisfactory, because 
they do not harmonise with the rest of our mental furniture, nor with 
still more solid fixtures, you may call it metaphysics if you like, but it is 
metaphysics in the modern sense as a methodological science like 
mathematics or logic—a critical science of explanations. 
But when Prof. Bergson goes on to tell us how he conceives of the 
origin and nature of life, then he plunges us into what is appropriately 
called “the metaphysics of source ”—metaphysics in the ordinary sense. 
Bergson’s metaphysical theory is that a broad current of consciousness 
has penetrated matter, carrying matter along to organisation. He does not 
