Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson was a French-Jewish philosopher and Nobel Prize winner in Literature, whose third major work, "Creative Evolution", provided an alternate explanation for Darwin's mechanism of evolution. First published in French in 1907 and translated into English in 1911, the work proposes an orthogenesis or progressive theory of evolution in which Bergson argues that organisms innately evolve towards an end goal. Bergson focuses on four key steps...

The subject of the significance of dreams, so long ignored, has suddenly become a matter of energetic study and of fiery controversy the world over. The cause of this revival of interest is the new point of view brought forward by Professor Bergson in the paper which is here made accessible to the English-reading public. This is the idea that we can explore the unconscious substratum of our mentality, the storehouse of our memories, by means of dreams,...

French philosopher Henri Bergson produced four major works in his lifetime, the second of which, "Matter and Memory", is a philosophical and complex nineteenth century exploration of human nature and the spirituality of memory. In this work, Bergson investigates the function of the brain, and opposes the idea of memory being of a material nature, lodged within a particular part of the nervous system. He makes a claim early in this essay that matter...

"Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was one of the great philosophers of our era whose concept of creative evolution continues to dominate a large area of modern thought. In Bergson's view, the world includes two opposing tendencies - life and matter. LIfe is dynamic, has force and will, and struggles for richness and complexity through and beyond matter. Matter is the congealed residue of creation that has already taken place and, according to the laws of...