The Creative Mind by Henri Bergson

(The following notes are taken from the book 'The Creative Mind: an introduction to metaphysics' by Henri Bergson.)

For Bergson 'the fact is that a self-contained(vrai) system is an assemblage of conceptions so abstract, and consequently so vast, that it might contain, aside from the real, all that is possible and even impossible.'
For Bergson science fails to describe reality as: ' science extracts and retains from the material world that which is not in a state of flow'. Instead, he tries to set the basis of a philosophy of metaphysics, whose general characteristics would be 'attached to the intuition of change'.

In page 2 he writes:
'Ever since my university days i have been aware that duration is measured by the trajectory of a body in motion and that mathematical time is a line; but i had not yet observed that this operation contrasts radically with all other processes of measurement, for it is not carried out on an aspect or an effect representative of what one wishes to measure, but on something which excludes it. The line one measures is immobile, time is mobility.The line is made, it is complete, time is what is happening, and more than that, it is what causes everything to happen.'
'...Usually when we speak about time we think of the measurement of duration, and not of the duration itself. But this duration which science eliminates, and which is so difficult to conceive and express, is what one feels and lives.:

In the chapter: 'The Possible and the Real' he mentions 'the continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty which seems to be going on in the universe.' while he notes 'how abstract and stilled is the thing(he has) imagined in comparison to what actually happens.'

 The chapter 'The perception of change' is dedicated to the necessity of grasping the state of change which encompasses the universe:
'...If one made an effort to grasp it, everything would become simplified; philosophical difficulties, considered insurmountable would fall away. Not only would philosophy gain by it, but our everyday life. I mean the impression things make upon us and the reaction of our intelligence, our sensibility and our will upon things would perhaps be transformed and, as it were, transfigured.'
For Bergson something like that could be possible through intuition and metaphysics, and not through reasoning while he defines it as a question of 'fleeing'. In page 115 he writes: ' For Plato and for all those who understand metaphysics in that way, breaking away from life and converting one's attention consisted in transporting oneself immediately into a world different from the one we inhabit, in developing other faculties of perception than the senses and consciousness.'
In page 116 he continues stating: 'Reasoning will not have made you go one step beyond what you had perceived in the first place.'
In page 136 he writes: ' If there exists a means of possessing reality, absolutely, instead of knowing it relatively, of placing oneself within it instead of adopting points of view towards it, of having the intuition of it instead of making the analysis of it, in short, of grasping it over and above expression, translation or symbolical representation, metaphysics is that very means. Metaphysics is therefore the science which claims to dispense with symbols.
'... There is at least one reality which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our own person in its flowing through time, the self which endures. With no other thing can we sympathize intellectually, or if you like, spiritually. But one thing is sure: we sympathize with ourselves.'
Bergson concludes to a definition of consciousness as a 'continuity of flow', 'a succession of states':
'...If i seek what is the most constantly or durably myself, i find something altogether different'