Henri Bergson (1859–1941,) fully Henri-Louis Bergson, was a French philosopher of science. Believing that the way to reality was by intuition, he coined the term “élan vital” (“the vital impulse” or the spirit of life) in his most famous work, Creative Evolution (1907.) The élan vital is at work everywhere in the world, in all forms of life.
Born in Paris to a Jewish family of Polish and Irish ancestry, Bergson studied at the École Normale Supérieure, where he submitted for his doctorate a distinguished Essai that evolved into Time and Free Will (1889; Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience.) In 1900, he accepted a professorship at the Collège de France, remaining there until his retirement in 1924.
Bergson was the first to elaborate on what came to be called a process philosophy, which rejected static values in favor of values of motion, change, and evolution. To him, existence was a struggle between a person’s life force (élan vital) and the material world: people perceive the material world using intellect, whereas the life force is perceived through intuition.
Also a master literary stylist, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. His works include Matter and Memory (1911; Matière et mémoire, 1896) and Creative Evolution (1911; L’Évolution créatice, 1907.)
Bergson did not give rise to a distinct Bergsonian school of philosophy, but his influence has been considerable. His works influenced writers such as Marcel Proust and George Bernard Shaw. His philosophy influenced the work of William James, George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, and other 20th century metaphysicians.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Henri Bergson
Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Intelligence
Think like a man of action, and act like a man of thought.
—Henri Bergson
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Religion
We regard intelligence as man’s main characteristic and we know that there is no superiority which intelligence cannot confer on us, no inferiority for which it cannot compensate
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Intelligence
There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Happiness
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
—Henri Bergson
The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Vanity
Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Spirit, Spirituality
Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Time
There is no perception that is not full of memories.
—Henri Bergson
Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Laughter
An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Intuition
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Instincts, Reason
To perceive means to immobilize… we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Perception
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Time, Past, The Past
Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Sex
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