Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Bergson says life is not like a clock or a machine. A clock just ticks out what was built into it, but living things keep making new things that nobody could have guessed. He calls this push inside life a vital impetus, a kind of creative rush that splits, grows, and tries new paths, in plants, in animals, and in us. Time, for Bergson, is not just minutes passing. It is life itself, growing as it goes.
Bergson starts from a puzzle. Science explains the world by breaking it into parts, like frames of a film, and it works on stones and machines. But a living thing is not a pile of parts, and its time is not clock time. In what Bergson calls duration, the past lives on inside the present and the future is genuinely new. Evolution, read this way, cannot be a machine running down or a plan being unrolled.
His famous name for life's push is the vital impetus, the elan vital: one original current that divides as it goes, into plant stillness, animal instinct, and human intelligence, Instinct knows life from inside but cannot think it. Intelligence makes tools and concepts but freezes what it touches. Philosophy's job is to use intuition to follow the current itself.
Henri Bergson published the book in French in 1907, and it made philosophy a public event: his Paris lectures drew crowds, and the work later helped earn him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. Darwin stays honored but reframed. Anyone tired of choosing between mechanism and empty purpose will find Bergson a third road, argued with grace.
Henri Bergson asks why our minds, so good at measuring clocks and machines, keep missing life itself. In Creative Evolution, published in French in 1907, he argues that life moves as a creative current, the vital impetus, forever inventing new forms rather than unfolding a fixed plan. Against both mechanism and tidy purpose, Bergson offers duration, real lived time, as the key. The book made him famous and helped win him the Nobel Prize.
The title page of this text reads Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson, Member of the Institute and Professor at the College de France, in an authorized translation by Arthur Mitchell, published in New York by Henry Holt and Company in 1911. The French original appeared in 1907. Mitchell's translator's note, from Harvard University, records unusual care: William James helped illuminate difficult passages, and Bergson himself carefully revised the whole translation.
The contents map Bergson's route. Chapter One takes up the evolution of life against mechanism and teleology, examining Darwin, De Vries, and the neo Lamarckians before arriving at the vital impetus. Chapter Two follows life's divergent directions, torpor, intelligence, and instinct. Chapter Three turns to the meaning of life and the form of intelligence, and Chapter Four confronts the cinematographical mechanism of thought itself.
Read this 1911 translation as the version that carried Bergson to the English speaking world, endorsed by James and corrected by its author. Its terms, duration, intuition, and the vital impetus, entered philosophy from these pages, and the book's fame later helped win Bergson the Nobel Prize.
Edition: Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Edition of 1911. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 26163.
The first chapter
In the writing of this English translation of Professor Bergson's most important work, I was helped by the friendly interest of Professor William James, to whom I owe the illumination of much that was dark to me as well as the happy rendering of certain words and phrases for which an English equivalent was difficult to find. His sympathetic appreciation of Professor Bergson's thought is well known, and he has expressed his admiration for it in one of the chapters of A Pluralistic Universe. It was his intention, had he lived to see the completion of this translation, himself to introduce it to English readers in a prefatory note.
I wish to thank my friend, Dr. George Clarke Cox, for many valuable suggestions.
I have endeavored to follow the text as closely as possible, and at the same time to preserve the living union of diction and thought. Professor Bergson has himself carefully revised the whole work. We both of us wish to acknowledge the great assistance of Miss Millicent Murby. She has kindly studied the translation phrase by phrase, weighing each word, and her revision has resulted in many improvements.
But above all we must express our acknowledgment to Mr. H. Wildon Carr, the Honorary Secretary of the Aristotelian Society of London, and the writer of several studies of "Evolution Creatrice." We asked him to be kind enough to revise the proofs of our work. He has done much more than revise them: they have come from his hands with his personal mark in many places. We cannot express all that the present work owes to him.
ARTHUR MITCHELL
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1907. Author died 1941. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
Starvard