" His thought ranges from subtle psychological analyses and
minute biological facts to the work of artists and poets, all-embracing
in its attempt to portray Life and make manifest to us the reality of
Time and of Change. His insistence on Change is directed to showing that
it is the supreme reality, and on Time to demonstrating that it is the
stuff of which things are made. He is right in attacking the false
conception of Time, and putting before us la duree as more real; right,
too, in attacking the notion of empty eternity. But although Change and
Development may be the fundamental feature of reality, Bergson does not
convincingly show that it is literally THE Reality, nor do we think that
this can be shown. He does not admit that there is any THING that
changes or endures; he is the modern Heraclitus; all teaching which
savours of the Parmenidean "one" he opposes. Yet it would seem that
these two old conceptions may be capable of a reconciliation and that if
all reality is change, there is a complementary principle that Change
implies something permanent.
Then, again, we feel Bergson is right in exposing the errors which the
"idea of the line," the trespassing of space, causes; but he comes very
near to denying, in his statements regarding duree pure, any knowledge
of the past as past; he overlooks the decisive difference between the
"no more" and the "not yet" feeling of the child's consciousness, which
is the germ of our clear knowledge of the past as past, and distinct
from the future.
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