Creative Evolution

First published in French in 1907, Henri Bergson¿s L¿¿lution cr¿rice is a scintillating and radical work by one of the great French philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This outstanding new translation, the first for over a hundred years, brings one of Bergson¿s most important and ambitious works to a new generation of readers.

A sympathetic though critical reader of Darwin, Bergson argues in Creative Evolution against a mechanistic, reductionist view of evolution. For Bergson, all life emerges from a creative, shared impulse, which he famously terms ¿n vital and which passes like a current through different organisms and generations over time. Whilst this impulse remains as forms of life diverge and multiply, human life is characterized by a distinctive form of consciousness or intellect. Yet as Bergson brilliantly shows, the intellect¿s fragmentary and action- oriented nature, which he likens to the cinematograph, means it alo