His theory of the origin of intellect is the same as that of William James. Life (through the evolutionary process) has produced it. But the conclusion that he draws from this hypothesis is that _the intellect, being itself a product of life, or a form of life, cannot understand the whole of life_. This thesis is elaborated with a wealth of illustration and erudition, both scientific and philosophic, and with a literary grace and charm possible only for a Frenchman, in the famous work _Evolution Creatrice_ (1907). BERGSON'S ADVANCE ON MACH AND JAMES.--Those thinkers who had made a serious attempt at a philosophy of science, had demonstrated that the "mechanical view" of nature was a mental abstraction, and not a complete representation of reality. Such is the debt of philosophy to the researches of Mach, Boutroux, James, and others who worked along their lines. But it remained for Bergson to demonstrate that the mechanical view was _the inevitable product of the mental processes which we describe by the word "intellect."_ The path which led Bergson to this goal will have to be briefly indicated by us. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE INTELLECT.--What is the "intellect," to which we look in vain for any _complete_ explanation of existence? This is the preliminary question. Our intellect is, as James had taught, a faculty developed by the evolutionary process in our species to enable it to deal with its _material_ environment. And Bergson was the first to point out that as a consequence of its having been developed for this particular purpose (i.e., dealing with a _material_ environment), intellect is "never quite at its ease, never entirely at home, except when it is working upon inert matter." If it has to deal with "living" matter, it "treats it as inert, without troubling about the life that animated it." Such is the first characteristic of the intellect: it feels at home in dealing with dead matter, and living matter it prefers to treat "as inert." Another characteristic of intellect is that, just as it treats the living as if it were non-living, so it prefers to treat the mobile as though it were motionless. Motion is a thing which the intellect simply cannot grasp; it has to treat it artificially, and represent a process which in reality is continuous and indivisible, as discontinuous and divisible--a succession of points, out of which no magic can conjure motion. Philosophy became aware of this as soon as it opened its eyes. Hence the paradox of Zeno, that Achilles will never overtake the tortoise, if the latter once gets a start. For if space and time are infinitely divisible (as intellect holds them to be), by the time Achilles has reached the tortoise's starting point, the tortoise has already got ahead of _that_ starting point, and so on _ad infinitum_; the interval between them being endlessly diminished, but never disappearing.