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Presidential Address
èlan vital is Life itself. To the objection that the hypothesis of the 'vital principle' as distinguished from physical energy explains nothing, Bergson makes an ingenious reply: ""the vital principle' may indeed not explain much, he says, but it is at least a sort of label affixed to our ignorance, so as to remind us of this occasionally, while mechanism invites us to ignore the ignorance. Unlike the older vital principle, however, Bergson's elan vital is a concrete and not an abstract principle. The essential difference between the mechanistic and the vitalistic view of Reality according to Bergson consists in this that while the former is barren or reduplicative, the latter is creative. This doctrine of 'Creative Evolution,' which is the same as what is called by some 'emergent evolution,' is a fundamental contribution of Bergson's to modern philosophy.
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Another doctrine of Bergson's which displays greater originality and hard thinking on the part of its author is his philosophy of Time, Change, and Duration. He distinguishes between mathematical Time (the ordinary meaning of the word) and the Time which is Duration. The latter is the e'lan vital or Life itself. Duration is no doubt persistence, but Bergson's "Life" is what is known as in that peculiar sense in which the word is employed several times in the Bhagavadgītā, and which seems to have the sense in which it was understood even in the Upanishads by the Samkhya. The origin of this sense lies in the fact that derived from the root बृद्दू (a secondary root traceable to वृच् to grow,) ब्रह्मन् came to mean the immanent principle which made for the growth of the Universe,
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