Creative Evolution (book)

Creative Evolution (French: L'Évolution créatrice) is a 1907 book by French philosopher Henri Bergson. Its English translation appeared in 1911. The book proposed a version of orthogenesis in place of Darwin's mechanism of evolution, suggesting that evolution is motivated by an élan vital, a "vital impetus" that can also be understood as humanity's natural creative impulse. The book was very popular in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The book also developed concepts of time (offered in Bergson's earlier work) which significantly influenced modernist writers and thinkers such as Marcel Proust. For example, Bergson's term "duration" refers to a more individual, subjective experience of time, as opposed to mathematical, objectively measurable "clock time." In Creative Evolution, Bergson suggests that the experience of time as "duration" can best be understood through intuition.

Harvard philosopher William James intended to write the introduction to the English translation of the book, but died in 1910 prior to its completion.

Publication data

• Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1911) tr. Arthur Mitchell, Henry Holt and Company
• 1944, Modern Library, Random House
• 1998, Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-40036-0
• 2005, Cosimo Classics, ISBN 0-7607-6548-0

See also

• Emergent evolution

External links

• Discussion of Creative Evolution (from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
• Creative Evolution at the Wayback Machine (archived May 16, 2006) 1911 edition online.
• Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution. Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1911, a digitized copy at the Internet Archive.