Iqbal was a trained philosopher, and one of the modern minds he engaged most closely was the Frenchman Henri Bergson. Bergson had argued against the mechanical, clock-time view of the universe — proposing instead that real time is durée, lived duration: flowing, creative, irreversible, alive.
Iqbal seized on this. If time is genuinely creative, then the universe is not a finished machine running down — it is still being made. Creation is ongoing. And that single idea is the philosophical root of Iqbal's whole insistence on motion, striving, and the dynamic self: in an unfinished cosmos, the awakened human being is invited to become a co-creator rather than a spectator.
Iqbal did not simply borrow. In his prose masterwork, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, he engages Bergson critically — accepting the living view of time, but refusing Bergson's downplaying of the intellect. The result is Iqbal's own: a universe in motion, a self in motion, and reason and intuition working together rather than at war.