ABSTRACT
The idea that philosophy can rival science in its demonstrability, though a claim Bergson entertained seriously, can perhaps be put down to professional optimism, but his method, as we shall see, does have much in common with that of his earlier works in so far as he applies some of the main ideas he had developed there, perhaps altering them to some extent in the process. He makes much use of the idea of increasingly divergent processes which are reconciled or transcended by some kind of synthesis, and he also constantly appeals to the ‘Zeno point’, as we may call it, that a real process can never be constructed out of the atoms into which its trajectory can be divided-though now he applies it to historical developments in the world rather than to theoretical constructions by us.
