certain. But because they exclude time, they are unable to represent one of the most fundamental characteristics of the world: its [*creativity*]{}, its ability to generate novel structures, processes, and entities.

Bergson [@bergson1911], by the beginning of the twentieth century, was already deeply bothered by the inability of mathematics and formal science to handle the creativity that is ubiquitous in the living world, and he believed that this was due to the use of “abstract” time — a representation of time — rather than “concrete” or real time. In spite of his perceptive analysis of the problem, however, he saw no real solution. In effect mathematics and the hard sciences would be unable to address the phenomenon of life because there was no way they could embody real or natural time [^2] in their formal and theoretical structures. Real time could only be intuited, and intuition fell outside the realm of hard science. This view had been anticipated by Goethe [@amrine1990; @miller2012], who took metamorphosis as the fundamental feature of nature. Implicitly recognising that formal systems could not encompass metamorphosis, he proposed a scientific methodology based on the development of an intuition of the phenomena by means of immersion in 