L'Évolution créatrice

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First Sentence

"THE existence of which we are most assured and which we know best is unquestionably our own, for of every other object we have notions which may be considered external and superficial, whereas, of ourselves, our perception is internal and profound."

Description

French philosopher Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution was published in 1907 and translated into English in 1911. Very popular at the time, it gives an alternate mechanism for evolution - that it is motivated by an "elan vital" a vital impetus, also graspable as our natural creative urge. It also looks at Bergson's conception of time, a subjective "duration" (rather than the quantifiable time of a clock) that is best understood not through the intellect but through our creative intuition, an idea that influenced Marcel Proust and other modernist thinkers.