Creative Evolution (Classic Reprint)
Henri Bergson
Language: English
Pages: 446
ISBN: 1451002009
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the writing of this English translation of Professor Bergson smost important work, I was helped by the friendly interest of Professor William James, to whom I owe the illumination of much that was dark to me as well as the happy rendering of certain words and phrases for which an English equivalent was difficult to find. His sympathetic appreciation of Professor Bergson sthought is well known, and he has expressed his admiration for it in one of the chapters of A Pluralistic Universe. It was his intention, had he lived to see the completion of this translation, himself to introduce it to English readers in a prefatory note. I wish to thank my friend, Dr. George Clarke Cox, for many valuable suggestions. I have endeavoured to follow the text as closely as possible, and at the same time to preserve the living union of diction and thought. Professor Bergson has himself carefully revised the whole work. We both of us wish to acknowledge the great assistance of Miss Millicent Murby. She has kindly studied the translation phrase by phrase, weighing each word, and her revision has resulted in many improvements.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology.
Forgotten Books' Classic Reprint Series utilizes the latest technology to regenerate facsimiles of historically important writings. Careful attention has been made to accurately preserve the original format of each page whilst digitally enhancing the aged text. Read books online for free at www.forgottenbooks.org
telligence far it CREATIVE EVOLUTION 6O a pre-existence of the future in the present in the form of idea. And the second theory, which sins by excess, is the outcome of the first, which sins by defect. In place of intellect proper must be substituted the more com- prehensive reality of which intellect is only the contraction. The future then appears as expanding the present: it was not, therefore, contained in the present form of a represented end. And in the it will explain the present
insert some indetermination into matter. Indeterof minate, i.e. unforeseeable, are the forms it creates in the course of its evolution. More and more indeterminate CREATIVE EVOLUTION I4O more and more free, is the activity to which these forms serve as the vehicle. A nervous system, with neii' rones placed end to end in such wise that, at the extremity of each, manifold ways open in which manifold questions present themselves, is a veritable reservoir of inalso, determination. That the main
automatic association of images, there are some that we do not hesitate to call intelligent foremost among them are those that bear witness to some idea of manufacture, whether the animal life succeeds in fashioning a crude : instrument or uses for its profit an object made by man. The animals that rank immediately after man in the matter of intelligence, the apes and elephants, are those that can use an artificial instrument occasionally. Below, but not very far from them, come those that rec-
unconsciousness, viz., that in which consciousness is absent, and that in which consciousness is nullified. Both are equal to zero, but in one case the zero expresses the fact that there is nothing, in the other that we have two equal quantities of opposite sign which compensate and neutralize each other. The unconsciousness of a falling stone is of the INTELLIGENCE AND INSTINCT 159 former kind: the stone has no feeling of its fall. Is if the same with the unconsciousness of instinct, in
faculty of using an organized natural instrument, it must involve innate knowledge (potential or unconscious, it is true), both of this instrument and of the object to which it is applied. Inthe second definition therefore innate knowledge of a thing. But intelthe faculty of constructing unorganized that ligence instruments. If, on its account, nais to say artificial stinct is is ture gives up endowing the living being with the instruments that may serve him, it is in order that the living