moment.”[1] Clearly, Bergson here suggests that matter consists in momentarily, as contrasted with continuously, conscious being or beings.
The last of these passages conceives matter in its opposition to life after the fashion of a conflicting personality. “Life,” Bergson says, “is tendency and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a sheaf (gerbe); creating by the mere fact of its growth diverging directions among which its impulse (élan) will divide itself. This,” Bergson continues, recurring to his constant analogy, “is what we observe in ourselves during the evolution of that special tendency which we call our character. Each one of us … will admit that his childhood personality, though indivisible, united in itself different persons. … But these interpenetrating personalities become incompatible as they grow older and since each of us lives but one life, he is forced to make a choice. In truth we choose unceasingly, and unceasingly we suffer great losses. The way which we take through time is strewn with the débris of all which we began to be. … Nature, on the other hand, is not bound to such sacrifices. … It retains the diverse tendencies. … It creates … diverging series of species which develop separately.’[2] The opposition which is essential to the diverging forms of life is, according to this teaching, analogous to the conflicting aspects of a self. That ‘brute matter’ which, colliding with the life current, precipitates and defines single individuals is itself personal in however low a degree.
Thus interpreted, Bergson’s view of nature is allied with Leibniz’s, Fechner’s and Ward’s: he is, in technical terms, a pluralistic personalist. It is true that more than one of his statements lends itself to a numerically monistic interpretation. “In the absolute,” he declares “we exist, we move and live.”[3] “The Absolute,” he says elsewhere, “reveals himself very close to us and, in a certain measure, in us.”[4] But despite these statements, and though he admits that nothing logically forbids our imagining a unique individual within which the evolution of life
