which are to be met with in philosophical works as elsewhere, are not to be frequently encountered in his writings.  There is always the fresh breeze of original thought blowing here.  He is by nature as well as by doctrine the sworn foe of conventionality.  Though he may not give us all we would wish, in our haste to be all-wise, let us yet be grateful to him for this, that he has the purpose and also the power to shake us out of complacency, to compel us to recast our philosophical account.  In this he is supremely serviceable to his generation, and is deserving of the gratitude of all who care for Philosophy.  For, while Philosophy cannot die, it may be allowed to fall into a comatose condition; and this is the unpardonable sin. 
                                   Alexander Mair

    Liverpool University

This huge vision of time and motion, of a mighty world which is always becoming, always changing, growing, striving, and wherein the word of power is not law, but life, has captured the modern imagination no less than the modern intellect.  It lights with its splendour the patient discoveries of science.  It casts a new radiance on theology, ethics and art.  It gives meaning to some of our deepest instincts, our strangest and least explicable tendencies.  But above and beyond all this, it lifts the awful weight which determinism had laid upon our spirits and fills the future with hope; for beyond the struggle and suffering inseparable from life’s flux, as we know it, it reports to us, though we may not hear them, “the thunder of new wings.”

Evelyn Underhill

CHAPTER I

LIFE OF BERGSON

Birth and education—­Teaches at Clermont-Ferrand—­Les donnees immediates de la conscience—­Matiere et Memoire—­Chair of Greek Philosophy, then of Modern Philosophy, College de France—­L’Evolution creatrice—­Relations with William James—­Visits England and America—­Popularity—­Neo-Catholics and Syndicalists—­Election to Academie francaise—­War-work—­ L’Energie spirituelle.

Bergson’s life has been the quiet and uneventful one of a French professor, the chief landmarks in it being the publication of his three principal works, first, in 1889, the Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience, then Matiere et Memoire in 1896, and L’Evolution creatrice in 1907.  On October 18th, 1859, Henri Louis Bergson was born in Paris in the Rue Lamartine, not far from the Opera House.[Footnote:  He was not born in England as Albert Steenbergen erroneously states in his work, Henri Bergsons Intuitive Philosophie, Jena, 1909, p. 2, nor in 1852, the date given by Miss Stebbing in her Pragmatism and French Voluntarism.] He is descended from a prominent Jewish family of Poland, with a blend of Irish blood from his mother’s side.  His family lived in London for a few years after his birth, and he obtained an early familiarity with the English language from his mother.  Before he was nine years old his parents crossed the Channel and settled in France, Henri becoming a naturalized citizen of the Republic.