Bergson's philosophy is the antithesis of the natural-science view of the universe as mechanism. In that view the laws of nature are fixed sequences controlling matter, or energy, and the more complicated and faultless the mechanism the higher the life. Just how this mechanism became conscious of the fact that it was a mechanism--caught itself at itself, so to speak, and announced the laws of its own being--is a question as puzzling as the old theological one of the aseity of God--which is simply a Latinized way of asking how the deity could, being infinite, turn himself inside out in such a manner as to become aware of his own existence and attributes. In fact, the two questions are one and the same. According to Bergson, mechanism not only cannot explain consciousness, but it is the very antithesis of conscious life. Behind mechanism he places an inextinguishable but not uncheckable vital urge with endless potentialities and with no fixed goal. The progress of this "elan vital" is through resistance to matter, which is simply the reversal of its own movement. The onward urge is what Bergson calls "pure duration" or motion, and its collision with its own reverse movement is what appears to us as space. The actual situation of life at any given time is simply a _modus vivendi_ between this spiritual activity striving to be free, and the reverse movement. We know, of course, that the physical universe is simply energy running down. Just as a glass of water cools off, so the sun dissipates its heat, and so, we are learning, the elements break up into simpler forms, giving off their contained energy in the forms of heat and electricity as they do so. But on the other hand the plant takes unto itself that energy of the sun, and with it builds up again the inorganic salts from its soil into higher forms with a greater content of stored energy. What the plant does, says Bergson, is typical and symbolical of what all life does at all times: sets up a reverse current to the running-down tendency of the universe of matter.