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Audiobook edition · 15 h 55 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if life is neither a machine nor a finished plan, but something that keeps creating?
In Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson asks how life comes to take so many forms. He accepts evolution but challenges two ways of explaining it: blind causes pushing a machine, and a goal fixed in advance. For him, both miss what matters most about time—the possibility that something truly new can happen.
Bergson begins with the difference between time you measure and time you live. Waiting for sugar to melt opens a path toward his central idea: the vital impetus, a current of creative energy. Along the way, a shellfish’s eye, a hunting wasp and a film strip bring his questions about life and the mind into focus.
What you’ll discover
- Time you cannot hurry Consider why waiting for sugar to melt reveals something a clock cannot capture.
- Life beyond the machine Follow Bergson’s challenge to explanations that leave no room for genuine creation.
- The vital impetus Explore his idea of a creative current passing from one generation to the next.
- Instinct beside intelligence Meet ants, bees and wasps as Bergson traces distinct ways of knowing.
- Another way to understand Discover why Bergson turns to intuition where he sees the limits of intellect.
Who will love it
For readers who love big questions about life, time and the mind, and who enjoy following an argument built from images.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Lived time is not measured time
- Mechanism treats life as a machine
- Finalism is mechanism turned inside out
- The eye shows that chance cannot be enough
- A vital impetus drives life onward
- Plants and animals split life's paths
- Instinct and intelligence are two ways of knowing
- Intuition follows what intellect cuts apart
- Order, nothingness and the book's afterlife
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- 15-minute summary
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- Hardcover
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- Large print hardcover
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L’evoluzione creatrice
by Henri Bergson · 1907
Bergson follows a shellfish eye and a hunting wasp to ask whether life creates what no machine or plan can explain.
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In short
Creative Evolution is a book of philosophy about life, written by the French thinker Henri Bergson and published in 1907 under the title L'Évolution créatrice. Bergson was a professor at the Collège de France and already well known for his work on time and memory.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Lived time is not measured time
Bergson starts with a plain experience. When you wait for sugar to melt in a glass of water, you cannot hurry it. The minutes you spend waiting are not a number on a clock. They are a stretch of your own inner life, and they cannot be cut short without changing what you live.
He calls this real time duration. In duration, the past does not disappear when the present arrives. It gathers up behind you and presses into each new moment. Your state of mind at any instant holds everything you have lived so far, and so it never repeats exactly. For a conscious being, to exist is to change, and to change is to mature.
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What is Creative Evolution about?
It is a work of philosophy that explains how life develops. Bergson argues that evolution is a real creation in time, driven by a vital impetus, and that neither pure mechanism nor a fixed plan can account for it.
What is the élan vital?
Élan vital means vital impetus or vital force in French. For Bergson it is a current of creative energy that runs through all living things, divides as it grows and works against the resistance of matter.
Did Bergson reject Darwin's theory of evolution?
No. Bergson accepts that species evolve and that natural selection plays a part. He doubts that chance variations and selection alone can explain how complex organs arise, and he looks for a deeper cause.
The author
Henri Bergson
1859–1941 · French philosopher
Henri Bergson was a French philosopher and Nobel laureate whose ideas about time, intuition, and creativity made him one of the most influential thinkers of his day. Laughter, his celebrated essay on comedy, asks why we laugh and what humor reveals about being human.
More by Henri Bergson
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