Creative Evolution

Bergson's best-known book, published in 1907, which offers a philosophical account of evolution. Chapter 1 argues that neither mechanism, which explains life by blind physical causes, nor finalism, which sees it as carrying out a plan, can account for the creative novelty of living forms, taking the similar eyes of a scallop and a vertebrate as a test case. Bergson proposes instead an original impetus of life, the élan vital, which divides as it advances. Chapter 2 follows its divergent lines: plants and animals, and among animals instinct, best seen in insects, and intelligence, best seen in humans. Chapter 3 traces how intellect and matter arose together: intelligence, formed for handling solid bodies, misunderstands life, while intuition can grasp it from within. Chapter 4 criticises the idea of nothing and the 'cinematographic' habit of thought that treats change as a series of still frames, and reviews the history of philosophy from Plato to Spencer in that light.

It is the main statement of process thinking about life, and it still raises sharp questions about novelty, time and the limits of mechanistic explanation in biology.