Creative Evolution (Dodo Press)

Creative Evolution (L'Evolution creatrice) is a 1907 book by French philosopher Henri Bergson. Its English translation appeared in 1911. The book provides an alternate explanation for Darwin's mechanism of evolution, suggesting that evolution is motivated by an elan 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, before the Neodarwinian synthesis was developed. Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941) was a major French philosopher, influential in the first half of the twentieth century. Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris. He attended the Lycee Fontaine in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He entered the famous Ecole Normale Superieure. He obtained there the degree of Licence-es- Lettres, and this was followed by that of Agregation de Philosophie in 1881. In 1901 Felix Alcan published a work which had previously appeared in the Revue de Paris, entitled Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Le Rire), one of the most important of Bergson's minor productions. This essay on the meaning of comedy was based on a lecture which he had given in his early days in the Auvergne. The study of it is essential to an understanding of Bergson's views of life, and its passages dealing with the place of the artistic in life are valuable. A presidential address, The Meaning of the War (1915), was delivered in December, 1914, to the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. He also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.