Conclusion

Abstract

The full implications of Bergson’s intuition of duration are brought to light in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion which he presented to the public after forty years of philosophical reflection on reality sub specie durationis. Experience had revealed to him two distinct and irreducible moralities — the closed morality which he identified with nature, instinct, social cohesion — in a word, with biological necessity; and the open morality which he identified with the direct movement of the élan vital, intuition, creative emotion, and universal brotherhood. All the oppositions which had been set up in his earlier works are preserved here, for the closed morality is static, routine, conservative, while the open morality is dynamic, novel and progressive.