How did Herbert Spencer’s ideas influence Henri Bergson’s early thinking?

In his early intellectual development, Henri Bergson was deeply influenced by the works of Herbert Spencer, which led him to adopt a perspective rooted in mechanistic theories.1

Bergson later reflected that he had been "wholly imbued" with these mechanistic views during his early career. However, this influence served as a crucial catalyst for his later philosophical departure. While analyzing the concept of time within physics and mechanics, Bergson realized that scientific time—which is measured by clocks and spatialized—fails to account for "duration" (durée), or lived time.1

This realization prompted Bergson to reject the mechanistic framework he had previously accepted from Spencer. He concluded that positive science essentially functions by eliminating duration, a discovery that became the foundation for his own philosophy and his seminal work, Time and Free Will.1