for themselves in each direction.  If they care most for a real fluidity, as William James did, they will stick to something like what I have just described; but if they care most for immediacy, as we may suspect that M. Bergson does, they will transform that view into something far more orthodox.  For a real fluidity and an absolute immediacy are not compatible.  To believe in real change you must put some trust in representation, and if you posit a real past and a real future you posit independent objects.  In absolute immediacy, on the contrary, instead of change taken realistically, you can have only a feeling of change.  The flux becomes an idea in the absolute, like the image of a moving spiral, always flowing outwards or inwards, but with its centre and its circumference always immovable.  Duration, we must remember, is simply the sense of lasting; no time is real that is not lived through.  Therefore various lives cannot be dated in a common time, but have no temporal relations to one another.  Thus, if we insist on immediacy, the vaunted novelty of the future and the inestimable freedom of life threaten to become (like all else) the given feeling of novelty or freedom, in passing from a given image of the past to a given image of the future—­all these terms being contained in the present; and we have reverted to the familiar conception of absolute immutability in absolute life.  M. Bergson has studied Plotinus and Spinoza; I suspect he has not studied them in vain.

Nor is this the only point at which this philosophy, when we live a while with it, suddenly drops its mask of novelty and shows us a familiar face.  It would seem, for instance, that beneath the drama of creative evolution there was a deeper nature of things.  For apparently creative evolution (apart from the obstacle of matter, which may be explained away idealistically) has to submit to the following conditions:  first, to create in sequence, not all at once; second, to create some particular sequence only, not all possible sequences side by side; and third, to continue the one sequence chosen, since if the additions of every new moment were irrelevant to the past, no sequence, no vital persistence or progress would be secured, and all effort would be wasted.  These are compulsions; but it may also, I suppose, be thought a duty on the part of the vital impulse to be true to its initial direction and not to halt, as it well might, like the self-reversing Will of Schopenhauer, on perceiving the result of its spontaneous efforts.  Necessity would thus appear behind liberty and duty before it.  This summons to life to go on, and these conditions imposed upon it, might then very plausibly be attributed to a Deity existing beyond the world, as is done in religious tradition; and such a doctrine, if M. Bergson should happen to be holding it in reserve, would perhaps help to explain some obscurities in his system, such, for instance, as the power of potentiality to actualise itself, of equipoise to become suddenly emphasis on one particular part, and of spirit to pursue an end chosen before it is conceived, and when there is no nature to predetermine it.