Why did Henri Bergson think traditional philosophy misunderstood change?

Henri Bergson argued that traditional philosophy misunderstood change because it relied on a "cinematographical mechanism of thought," which falsified reality by imposing static, discrete concepts upon a world defined by perpetual flux.1

Bergson believed that traditional thought failed to appreciate the nature of "becoming" because it treated time as a spatialized, measurable quantity rather than as duration—the lived, qualitative experience of time. By attempting to analyze reality through conceptualization and quantification, philosophy and science tended to view the world as a series of solid, discontinuous states rather than as a continuous, flowing process.21

To Bergson, this approach was a "mechanistic illusion" that ignored the essential reality of things. He maintained that because traditional methods are inherently analytic and spatializing, they are useful for practical action but incapable of grasping the true nature of change. Instead, he argued that the innermost reality of existence can only be understood through intuition—a global, immediate mode of knowledge that reaches into the heart of reality by sympathy with its duration.12