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Presidential Address
819
it is also change. We endure not inspite of change but owing to change. This doctrine of change is essentially connected with that of creative evolution. Bergson says: "The unit erse endures. The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means inyention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new." It will be thus observed that Bergson's emphasis is more upon the dynamic than upon the static element in Reality.
Lastly, let us hear Bergson on the problem of man's relation with Life and the possibility of his progress. He says: “From our point of view life appears in its entirety as an immense wave, which starting from à centre, spreads outwards, and which on almost the whole of its circumference is stopped and converted into oscillation," (This is Bergson's explanation of the origin of Matter ), "at one single point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has passed freely. It is this freedom that the human form registers. Everywhere but in man, consciousness has had to come to a stand; in man, alone it has kept on its way." "Philosophy introduces us thus into the spiritual life. And it shows us at the same time the relation of the life of the spirit to that of the body." Then in pointing out the fundamental error of popular ideas of God and his Heaven, he continues: “ The Great error of the doctrines on the spirit has been the idea that by isolating the spiritual life from all the rest, by suspending it in space as high as possible above the earth, they were placing it beyond attack, as if they are not thereby simply exposing it to be taken as an effect of a mirage.”
