it towards a doctrine of evolution; and hence the success of
Spencer.

But time, which is everywhere in modern science the chief variable, is
only a time-length, indefinitely and arbitrarily divisible. There is
no genuine duration, nothing really tending to evolution in Spencer's
evolution: no more than there is in the periodic working of a turbine or
in the stationary tremble of a diapason. Is not this what is emphasised
by the perpetual employment of mechanical images and vulgar engineering
metaphors, the least fault of which is to suppose a homogeneous time,
and a motionless theatre of change which is at bottom only space? "In
such a doctrine we still talk of time, we pronounce the word, but we
hardly think of the thing; for time is here robbed of all effect."
("Creative Evolution", page 42.)

Whence comes a latent materialism, ready to grasp the chance of
self-expression. Whence the automatic return to the dream of universal
arithmetic, which Laplace, Du Bois-Reymond, and Huxley have expressed
with such precision. (Ibid., page 41.)

In order to escape such consequences we must, with Mr Bergson,
reintroduce real duration, that is to say, creative duration into
evolution, we must conceive life according to the mode exhibited with
regard to change in general. And it is science itself which calls us
to this task. What does science actually tell us when we let it speak
instead of prescribing to it answers which conform to our
preferences? Vitality, at every point of its becoming, is a tangent to
physico-chemical mechanism. But physico-chemistry does not reveal its
secret any more than the straight line produces the curve.

Consider the development of an embryo. It summarises the history of
species; ontogenesis, we are told, reproduces phylogenesis. And what do
we observe then?

Now that a long sequence of centuries is contracted for us into a short
period, and that our view is thus capable of a synthesis which before
was too difficult, we see appearing the rhythmic organisation, the
musical character, which the slowness of the transitions at first
prevented us from seeing. In each state of the embryo there is something
besides an instantaneous structure, something besides a conservative
play of actions and reactions; there is a tendency, a direction, an
effort, a creative activity. The stage traversed is less interesting
than the traversing itself; this again is an act of generating impulse,
rather than an effect