Next comes a description of various contemporary (1907) models of evolution: Organic evolution resembles the evolution of consciousness. The entirely of life has duration – not just individuals. This binds all life together as a current of continuous progress. He describes all reproduction as a form of budding – splitting off a little piece of a creature, which can then exist on its own. Along with this tendency towards identity, life has a contradictory tendency towards reproduction. An animal exists in a sense that a rock does not because the animal’s parts are bound together and it can only exist as a whole. They can both be explained by tendencies of the human intellect which help us survive.įor life, we can’t separate out a simple system because things have identity. Neither is an accurate depiction of time. The tool also has a purpose (an end cause) – the finalistic view of teleology. In building a tool, we think of it as a collection of simple interacting parts – the mechanistic view of science. 36īoth the mechanistic and finalistic views come from humans’ need to design tools. Anything that is irreducible and irreversible in the successive moments of history eludes science. Science can work only on what is supposed to repeat itself – that is to say, on what is withdrawn, by hypothesis, from the action of real time. This is an insufficient understanding of time to describe anything that really builds on itself / has duration / endures. Because it is simple, its future can be exactly predicted by its present – using a differential equation. It selects some simple system and artificially isolates the system from the rest of the world. Mechanistic science has time as a parameter. Anything which builds on itself has this sense of time – psychology, species, life as a whole, the entire universe.

The future is larger than the present and so it cannot, in principle, be predicted – a predicted future is smaller than the present. Even if it’s not explicitly remembered, it builds on our character.

My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration it accumulates. Prerequisites: None, but a basic understanding of the history of evolution would be useful.īergson starts with a description of what it is like to experience time. The full text of this book can be found here. A radical view of evolution, founded on a very different understanding of time and knowledge.

Creative evolution by henri bergson