This apparently traditional and everywhere vague and figurative fashion in which L’évolution créatrice describes matter throws us back upon the explicitly idealistic conception in Matière et Mémoire. As has appeared, Bergson there teaches that matter is made up of images and that “without doubt the material universe, defined as totality of images, is a kind of consciousness.”[1] “In matter,” he has previously said, “there is something more but not anything different from the actually given (ce qui est actuellement donné[2]). In other words, matter is not a hidden cause, an unknown reality, but a complex of qualities, immediately known. ”Matter” so Bergson teaches (with Berkeley, though Bergson does not notice the likeness) “‘is precisely what it appears to be.”[3]
We have, finally, in L’évolution créatrice itself, suggestions of a personalistic interpretation of matter. The first of these compares matter with the formulations, the expressions, of consciousness. ”From bottom to top of the organic world,” Bergson says ‘‘there is always one sole, great effort; but most often this effort … is at the mercy of the materiality which it has of necessity given to itself. This is what every one of us can experience in himself. Our liberty, in the very movements by which it affirms itself, creates growing habits which will suffocate it unless it renews itself by constant effort. The liveliest thought will freeze in the formula which expresses it.”[4] Here matter is conceived as opposed not to consciousness but to freedom: in Bergson’s words, once more, ”Matter is necessity.“[5]
In a second passage,[6] Bergson supposes a state in which there is ”neither memory nor will … nothing but the moment which dies and is re-born again and again. … One may assume,” he concludes, “that physical existence tends to be of this second sort.” This reminds one of Ward’s Leibnizian doctrine of ‘bare monads’ and his description of the bare monad as one “whose organism, so to say, reduces to a point, and its present to a
