e science or nothing. And
here again M. Bergson's criticism, though searching, is not new, however
freshly put. In respect of his sociology in particular, Mr. Spencer has
been repeatedly so criticised; and it is here alone that his limitation
of method is really serious, inasmuch as it affects his prescriptions.
As regards the conception of sub-human evolution, his way of reducing
the past to 'pieces' of evolution is not only not injurious, it was the
only way in which evolution in Nature could well have been realised by
men. M. Bergson is all for the 'creative' aspect of evolution, the
Living Now, the emergence of the latest phenomenon as not merely the
result of the one before, but the living manifestation of the whole. But
this is simply the instinctive, pre-scientific relation to the problem,
returned to and restored, as it had need be, to its place in a
scientific schema from which it had been dropped precisely because it
led nowhere.

M. Bergson has suffered, probably, from the zeal even of instructed
exponents, to say nothing of the acclamations of the amateur; but
perhaps even M. Bergson, by reason of his linear mode of advance,
misconceives the full significance of his own restatements of perceptual
and conceptual fact. His theorem has been represented as vindicating the
thesis of Mr. Samuel Butler's 'Luck or Cunning'--the thesis, namely,
that animal survival and progress are to be conceived in terms of gift
or effort rather than of environment; that Lamarckism, once more, is
truer than Darwinism. But the argument overlooks the fact that Cunning
may be envisaged as Luck; and that Lamarckism without Darwinism halts
far worse than Darwinism without Lamarckism. At best, the 'living' view
of evolution is but a complement of the other, a return from analysis to
outcome. Put singly, it is no addition to knowledge.

'We called the chess-board white: we call it black,'

the onlooker might say, with Browning; while the analyst might retort
that, like the savage, he was quite conscious of the ever-moving point
of life, the Living Now, but preferred to give his mind to the still
and spacious past, and 'to cut it up into pieces' by way of knowing
something about the law of things, past, present, and future.

The morally valid element in M. Bergson's insistence on 'creative
evolution' (again an old term, by the way) is the vindication of
personality as a creative form. But this was not necessary as regards
the