ut of a reason fashioned to the habits and demands of
Cartesian mechanism or Newtonian physics." (H. Bergson, "Report of
French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.) Moreover,
he plainly studies only adult reason, its present state, a plane of
thought, a sectional view of becoming. For Kant, men progress perhaps
in reason, but reason itself has no duration: it is the fixed spot, the
atmosphere of dead eternity in which every mental action is displayed.
But this could not be the final and complete truth. Is it not a fact
that human intelligence has been slowly constituted in the course of
biological evolution? To know it, we have not so much to separate it
statically from its works, as to replace it in its history.

Let us begin with life, since, in any case, whether we will or no, it is
always in life and by life that we are.

Life is not a brute force, a blind mechanism, from which one could never
conceive that thought would spring. From its first pulsation, life
is consciousness, spiritual activity, creative effort tending towards
liberty; that is, discernment already luminous, although the quality is
at first faint and diffused. In other terms, life is at bottom of the
psychological nature of a tendency. But "the essence of a tendency is
to develop in sheaf-form, creating, by the mere fact of its growth,
diverging directions between which its impulse will be divided."
("Creative Evolution", page 108.)

Along these different paths the complementary potentialities are
produced and intensified, separating in the very process, their original
interpretation being possible only in the state of birth. One of them
ends in what we call intelligence. This latter therefore has become
gradually detached from a less intense but fuller luminous condition, of
which it has retained only certain characteristics to accentuate them.

We see that we must conceive the word mind--or, if we prefer the word,
thought--as extending beyond intelligence. Pure intelligence, or the
faculty of critical reflection and conceptual analysis, represents only
one form of thought in its entirety, a function, a determination or
particular adaptation, the part organised in view of practical action,
the part consolidated as language. What are its characteristics? It
understands only what is discontinuous, inert, and fixed, that which has
neither change nor duration; it bathes in an atmosphere of spatiality;
it uses mathematics continually; it f