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Presidential Address
What I have already said in connection with 'emergent evolution' applies to Bergson's 'creative' evolution also, since the two are one. In my humble opinion, its logic is halting for no attempt is made to analyse the meanings of 'creative' and 'evolution', and put them together, and thus disclose the antinomy of the causal relation which it involves. Another defect of Bergson's explanation of the origination of matter from life has been pointed out by an Italian critic and the criticism goes to the very root of Bergson's Philosophy. Matter according to Bergson, is an interruption of the vital current, a negation inserted into the continuity of evolution, a solidification of life. Here asks the critic:-" But how is this arrest of the vital curient, this lapse into stagnation, explicable ? Life, as Bergson conceives it, if left, so to speak, to itself, ought to progress eternally; if it bends back and is deflected, it does so because some thing obstructs it. Thus life, which in its movement ought to create matter, itself pre-supposes an obstacle in the shape of matter. This is the enormous vicious circle in which the Bergsonian metaphysic revolves." And as the ground of this vicious circle the critic points out: "It is because he regards life as nature, not as consciousness”.
The home of the Philosophy of consciousness as the only Reality is Italy at the present day, and the two of its leading lights are Croce and Gentile. By them the scientific approach to Philosophy is unhesitatingly, almost uncermoniously, discarded. Croce's Philosophy which starts apparently as a criticism of Hegel is
