ting this preliminary analysis,
and proceeding to language, seeks to organise it according to the
mathematical type. But it is the vital type which corresponds to
absolute reality, at least when it is a question of the Whole; and only
intuition has re-access to it, by soaring above synthetic dissociations.

VIII. Conclusion.

As my last word and closing formula I come back to the leitmotiv of my
whole study: Mr Bergson's philosophy is a philosophy of duration.

Let us regard it from this point of view, as contact with creative
effort, if we wish to conceive aright the original notions which it
proposes to us about liberty, life, and intuition.

Let us say once more that it appears as the enthronement of positive
metaphysics: positive, that is to say, capable of continuous, regular,
and collective progress, no longer forcibly divided into irreducible
schools, "each of which retains its place, chooses its dice, and begins
a never-ending match with the rest." ("Introduction to Metaphysics"
in the "Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", January 1903. Psychology,
according to Mr Bergson, studies the human mind in so far as it operates
in a useful manner to a practical end; metaphysics represent the effort
of this same mind to free itself from the conditions of useful action,
and regain possession of itself as pure creative energy. Now experience,
the experience of the laboratory, allows us to measure with more and
more accuracy the divergence between these two planes of life; hence the
positive character of the new metaphysics.)

Let us next say that until the present moment it constitutes the only
doctrine which is truly a metaphysic of experience, since no other, at
bottom, explains why thought, in its work of discovery and verification,
remains in subjection to a law of probation by durable action. We
have now only to show how it evades certain criticisms which have been
levelled against its tendencies.

Some have wanted to see in it a kind of atheist monism. Mr Bergson has
answered this point himself. What he rejects, and what he is right in
rejecting, are the doctrines which confine themselves to personifying
the unity of nature or the unity of knowledge in God as motionless first
cause. God would really be nothing, since he would do nothing. But he
adds: "The considerations put forward in my "Essay on the Immediate
Data" result in an illustration of the fact of liberty; those of "Matter
and Memory" lead us, I