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Though Bergson was, as a young philosopher, full of admiration for the philosophy of Spencer, he severely criticized the spencerian conceptions about space and time in his thesis Les Données immédiates de la conscience. However Bergson was led by his psychological studies no more to restrict space to matter and time (duration) to consciousness so that the question of Evolution, formerly handled by Spencer, was set again by Bergson. The « vital impulse » of Bergson, which is the motor of Evolution, has all the properties of « creative duration ». The result is a new evolutionism, which is also a new positivism, because mecanism only holds for inert matter.