Note 402 — Chapter IX · PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON386

We must remember that to Bergson evolution has taken place along different lines—those of Automatism (in plant-life), Instinct (in animal life), and Intelligence (in human life and the higher animals), and that along none of those lines are we to fall into the errors either of materialism, or of “Darwinism” (the belief in “accidental variations”), or of the “design-philosophy,” or even of theories like “neo-Lamarckianism” or neo-vitalism. To him all these philosophies are but imperfect and hypothetical attempts to grasp “movement” and “life” which both “transcend finality, if we understand by finality the realisation of an idea conceived or conceivable in advance” (Creative Evolution, p. 236).