His God is the duree of our own conscious life, raised to a higher power.  Dieu se fait in the evolutionary process.  He is absolutely unfinished, not complete or perfect.  He is incessant life, action, freedom, and creativeness, and in so far as we ourselves manifest these (seen, above all, in the creative joy of the inventor, poet, artist, and mother) each of us has the “divine” at work within.  For Bergson, God is a Being immanent in the universe, but He is ignorant of the direction in which Evolution is progressing.  This is not the God of the ordinary religious consciousness, nor is it a conception of God which satisfies the limited notion which our own imagination both creates and craves to find real.  God, it would seem, must be greater than His works, and He must know what He is doing.  It has been objected that a force, even if a divine force (one can hardly call it “God” in the ordinary meaning of that vague word) which urges on Matter without knowing in what direction or to what end, is no God at all, for it is merely personified chance.  This is due to what Hegel calls “the error of viewing God as free.” [Footnote:  Logic, Wallace’s translation, first edition, p. 213.]

In reply to certain criticisms of his book L’Evolution creatrice made by Father de Tonquedec, Bergson wrote in 1912:  “I speak of God as the source whence issue successively, by an effort of his freedom, the currents or impulses each of which will make a world; he therefore remains distinct from them, and it is not of him that we can say that ‘most often it turns aside’ or is ’at the mercy of the materiality that it has been bound to adopt.’  Finally, the reasoning whereby I establish the impossibility of ‘nothing’ is in no way directed against the existence of a transcendent cause of the world; I have, on the contrary, explained that this reasoning has in view the Spinozist conception of Being.  It issues in what is merely a demonstration that ‘something’ has always existed.  As to the nature of this ‘something’ it is true that nothing in the way of a positive conclusion is conveyed.  But neither is it stated in any fashion that what has always existed is the world itself, and the rest of the book explicitly affirms the contrary.” [Footnote:  Tonquedec:  Dieu dans l’Evolution creatrice (Beauchesne), and Annales de philosophie chretienne, 1912.] “Now the considerations set forth in my Essai sur les donnees immediates result in bringing to light the fact of freedom, those of Matiere et Memoire point directly, I hope, to the reality of Spirit, those of L’Evolution creatrice exhibit creation as a fact.  From all this emerges clearly the idea of a God, creator and free, the generator of both Matter and Life, whose work of creation is continued on the side of Life by the evolution of species and the building up of human personalities.  From all this emerges a refutation of monism and of pantheism.” [Footnote:  Tonquedec:  Dieu dans l’Evolution creatrice (Beauchesne), and also Etudes des Peres de