[405] To Bergson concepts are just as hypothetical in the realm of science, as they are to thinkers like Mach and Poincaré, and Professor Ward of Cambridge. See the following, for example, from _Matter and Memory_ (p. 263): “We shall never explain by means of particles, whatever these may be, the simple properties of matter; at most we can thus follow out into corpuscles as artificial as the _corpus_, the body itself--the actions and reactions of this body with regard to all the others. This is precisely the object of chemistry. It studies bodies rather than _matter_; and so we understand why it stops at the atom, which is still endowed with the general properties of matter. But the materiality of the atom dissolves more and more under the eyes of the physicist. We have no reason, for instance, for representing the atom to ourselves as a solid, rather than as a liquid or gaseous, nor for picturing the reciprocal action of atoms by shocks rather than in any other way.” Or, the following characteristic passage from the same book (p. 280) in respect of the hypothetical character of the concepts of “pure _time_” and “pure _space_”: “Homogeneous _space_ and homogeneous _time_ are then neither properties of things nor essential conditions of our faculty of knowing them; they express, in an abstract form, the double work of solidification and of division, which we effect on the moving continuity of the real in order to obtain there a fulcrum for our action, in order to fix within it starting-points for our operation, in short, to introduce into it real changes. They are the _diagrammatic designs_ of our eventual action upon matter.” [406] Like his celebrated contemporary Eucken, and like many other thinkers of their time, Bergson is profoundly convinced of the one-sidedness of the so-called scientific culture of our day, and of the error of any and all conceptions of education and of social policy that are based upon it. Although I refer below to the limitations of his view that the intellect is adapted only to matter and to mechanical construction, I append the following quotation as symptomatic of his value as a spiritual teacher in our scientific age: “As regards human intelligence (_Creative Evolution_, pp. 145–6) it has not been sufficiently noted that mechanical invention has been from the first its essential feature, _that even to-day our social life gravitates around the manufacture and use of artificial instruments_.... This we hardly realise, _because it takes longer to change ourselves than to change our tools_.... In thousands of years, when seen from the distance, _only the broad lines of our present age will be visible_, our wars and our revolutions will count for little, even supposing they are remembered at all, but the steam-engine, and the procession of inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of prehistoric times; it will serve to define an age.”