Creative Evolution (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) »

Born in Paris of a Polish father and an Anglo-Irish mother, Henri Bergson (1858-1941) made a distinguished record as a student, winning an award in classics and two national competitions in mathematics. His progress through the French educational establishment, beginning in Parisian lycées, culminated in a chair at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure. It is more than a little ironic that Bergson, a very private individual and careful, even meticulous, scholar, was to be awarded so many honors, from the French Legion of Honor (1919) to the Nobel Prize for Literature (1928).

Creative Evolution appeared in Paris in 1907 to a receptive audience. In some respects a culmination of nineteenth-century thought, Henri Bergson's path-breaking work was nonetheless seen as one of the new century's radical breaks with the past, enjoying this status in the public mind with the work of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, and with the shock of post-impressionist art. Bergson's critiques of abstract ideas and Darwinian concepts of evolution, his celebrations of intuition and creativity, closely paralleled the spirit of the times. Creative Evolution, destined to have a significant effect on fields as diverse as genetic psychology, literary criticism, and thermodynamics, was to become the most unlikely of philosophical events-an international bestseller.