Bergson's Ideas

His Idea:

- There are two methods of intellectual inquiry: intuition and analysis.

- Analysis understands reality in terms of stability, predictability, and spatial location; intuition, on the other hand, experiences growth, novelty, and temporal duration.

- True donation is experienced only in the human person, and that duration is preserved in memory.

- Memory, while being informed by sense impressions, is not absolutely dependent upon the matter of the brain.

- Freedom is the personal event of self-creation.

- An inexhaustible, vital impulse orients all of creation to greater perfection and as such lies at the core of evolution.

- Mysticism, as ultimate transcendence, experiences the unity of all things and expresses itself in a call to universal love; this is the insight of dynamic religion and morality.

- Closed societies with their concern for social order and cohesion produce religions of authority, ritual, and hierarchy, as well as a morality focused on law.