Abstract

The objective of this study is to examine "Bergson's philosophy" as a whole in order to search out the interrelations, if any, that he demonstrates among science, religion, and reality. An internal approach has been adopted and applied to the analysis of Bergson's main philosophical works: Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution, The Creative Mind, Mind-Energy, Two Sources of Morality and Religion. ;The body of the thesis is organized around three questions of vital interest--questions that in Bergson's view, are the raison d' etre of all philosophical reflection: "What are we? Whence are we? Whither tend we?" The Bergsonian responses to these questions are treated in three main chapters: on human ontology, on the ultimate foundation of reality, and on morality and human destiny. His overall response to the questions of Man's nature, origin, and destiny, it is maintained, reflects an integration of science, religion, and reality from both the epistemological and the ontological points of view. ;Ontologically, a convergence of various data from different realms of experience appears to justify a spiritual interpretation of reality in accord with religious vision. Within such vision, Bergson's answer to Man's ultimate enigmas emerges as follows: Man is divine in origin, nature, and destiny. ;From God--an ultimate ontological category for Bergson--there emanate Creative impetuses, each of which falls back on itself and constitutes a world. Materiality is the residue left from the original impetus. Life, or consciousness, represents the active impetus that persists. In spite of the resistance imposed by matter, its creative effort continues, until it attains, in Man, an individuality with the possibility of continuity in personal experience. In the best of mankind, in the mystic, the religious and moral person par excellence, the creative impetus achieves its highest goal, namely to return to God. ;Epistemologically, Bergson's view leads to a reconciliation of science, metaphysics, and religion, being founded upon his notion of intuition as the proper mode of knowing real duration. This intuition can correspond with various undulations of reality, i.e., different intensities of duration, the lowest of which is the fading duration of matter and the highest is the eternity of God. Bergson credits intuition for what is best, original, and most genuine in the realm of science, metaphysics and religion