Knowledge and consciousness are acquired in the future through evolution on account of the presence of omniscience and eternal wisdom in the deep recesses of our own being, which we are only unfolding in the process of evolution. Knowledge is not created or acquired in the future; it is an eternal presence in us, which merely gets realised in the course of time. The vital impetus of Bergson is only the external phenomenon of the process of the return of the individual to the Absolute. The inward meaning of it is the necessity of an immutable consciousness which transcends even the elan vital. The elan vital is only the biological impulse of growth and the psychological phenomenon of mind which Bergson confuses with Reality. It is true that there is evolution in body and mind, and in Nature as observed by the evolving individual; so far we have to pay credit to Bergson. But it contradicts all sense to say that Reality is moving, changing and evolving. Bergson's evolution is an open march of the life-force without an end or a purpose, which shows signs of a wild running amuck, as it were, of the hungry consciousness which does not know what food it is in need of. Bergson is wrongly identifying the unchanging Reality with phenomenal life-force and mind which are subject to change and evolution in time. It is this false view that makes him think that the aim of evolution is in every immediately succeeding stage, and not in any eternally fixed being. It is not true that even God cannot preordain the goal of evolution. There is a purpose which determines the kinds of organisation which a living being is to put on in the different stages of its evolution. Else, why should a particular organisation follow from the present one? All urge, all movement, the elan vital itself, is a yearning to realise God who is absolute consciousness in essence. This is the final directing goal of evolution. Here evolution stops. Bergson needs to be corrected.

The errors, bunglings and apparent regressions observed in life do not prove that evolution is not directed by a final aim and that it is all new invention at every succeeding stage of evolution. The errors are the defects of the mind, potential or actual, which on account of a want of manifestation of a sufficient degree of intelligence suffers in life and learns by experience from within and without. It is not intelligence or consciousness that commits mistakes, but the psychological functions in the individual. They go wrong in their estimation of the true values of life. Discord and disharmony in Nature are the result of a partial observation of it by the individual. To know the harmonious workings of Nature, we have to partake of the universal being of Nature in our experience and not stand outside in space and time as disconnected witnesses. To know is to be, and not merely to look at and observe. The universe is a perfect harmony of forces. The ignorant evolving individuals cannot realise this fact as long as they remain individuals and do not see with the eye of spiritual intuition.

Bergson's intuition is not so deep as the intuition of the Vedanta. His 'sympathy' or entering the spirit of life seems to be an introspective intuition of the flow of the psychological consciousness and not an identification of the highest consciousness with pure being. The intuition of the Vedanta is a faculty of omniscience which comprehends the Absolute. Bergson has no possibilities of omniscience, no omniscient being exists for him. Even the elan vital is not omniscient. Further, he makes a sharp distinction between intellect and intuition. If instinct become self-conscious and ennobled can be identified with intuition, intellect too can become intuition when it is divested of its space-time relations. Intellect reveals a wider Reality than instinct, though it is handicapped by attachment to mathematical and logical ways of thinking from which instinct is free. But it is to be noted that only those endowed with intelligence can endeavour to reach intuition; the instinctive animal cannot do so. Intellect is the transition from instinct to intuition, and so it cannot be rejected as totally useless in one's spiritual advancement. The defect of instinct is that it is blind; that of intellect is that it is discursive. The value of intuition is in its integral illumination of total being, quite different from and superior to the partial views provided by the intellect. Instinct and intellect are stages in the advance of consciousness towards intuition.

Matter and consciousness are not, as Bergson supposes, different from each other metaphysically. The difficulty is that Bergson's consciousness is the principle of the psychological functions, and naturally matter which is presented as the body of the cosmos should be independent of these functions. For no individual can create matter outside or identify his mind with it. Yet, Bergson speaks of consciousness as a metaphysical principle, the essence of the elan vital, and sets it against matter which is an obstructing as well as a helping medium in the evolution of consciousness. Under these circumstances, it is unwarranted to identify this changing and moving life-impulse with Reality. It requires a profound observation and reflection to recognise that matter and consciousness are not really hostile elements, that they appear as the external object and the internal subject respectively when the latter is confined to individual psychological functioning, and that ultimately they form the two phases in which the Absolute manifests itself as the universe. The existence of matter cannot be known unless there is a relation between matter and consciousness. The admission of such a relation would be to accept a unitary being underlying the two. Matter to Bergson appears as an entity second to consciousness because he is unwillingly identifying Reality with subjective mind, though he thinks that it is true objectively also, merely because it is seen working in everyone outside. It has been already pointed out that metaphysical Reality is not what is merely subjectively felt, though it may be felt thus by all individuals. Reality has a non-relative existence transcending subjectivity. Bergson's consciousness evolves because it is the individual mind moving with the operations of matter in a world of space and time. Evolution is impossible without space-time relations, for evolution is causation, whether we conceive it as linear or organic. And space and time are phenomenal forms, they cannot be equated with Reality. Bergson unnecessarily emphasises the importance of time and makes it non-spatial, calling it an eternal duration which he identifies with Reality. It is impossible to conceive of time without space, and time does not cease to be a relative phenomenon merely because another word, viz., duration, is substituted for it. Space and time constitute a single continuum, and there can be no such thing as duration without time. Bergson thinks that there can be absence in space and yet there can be movement in time. This is a dogmatic assertion which cannot bear the test of experience, reason or observation. There cannot be succession or duration without space. Time cannot become Reality, for it has no existence independent of spatial and causal relations. Nor can it be said that causal change itself is Reality, for all change implies a changeless being as its ground.

Our steps in evolution are not completely free movements. We seem to have freedom because we work with our personal egos. If Reality is the Absolute, freedom can be only in a gradual approximation to it of the consciousness with which we work. Free-will is not opposed to determinism; it is the eternal universal law operating through a conscious individual ego that is called free-will. We are determined as individuals working independently with our personalities, but free as participators in the scheme of a cosmic consciousness. Our freedom is in proportion to our nearness to the Absolute. We are not really free until our consciousness is installed in the Absolute.