In Paris from 1868 to 1878 he attended the Lycee Fontaine, now known as the Lycee Condorcet.  While there he obtained a prize for his scientific work and also won a prize when he was eighteen for the solution of a mathematical problem.  This was in 1877, and his solution was published the following year in Annales de Mathematiques.  It is of interest as being his first published work.  After some hesitation over his career, as to whether it should lie in the sphere of the sciences or that of “the humanities,” he decided in favour of the latter, and when nineteen years of age, he entered the famous Ecole Normale Superieure.  While there he obtained the degree of Licencie-es-Lettres, and this was followed by that of Agrege de philosophie in 1881.

The same year he received a teaching appointment at the Lycee in Angers, the ancient capital of Anjou.  Two years later he settled at the Lycee Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, chief town of the Puy de Dome department, whose name is more known to motorists than to philosophers.  The year after his arrival at Clermont-Ferrand he displayed his ability in “the humanities” by the publication of an excellent edition of extracts from Lucretius, with a critical study of the text and the philosophy of the poet (1884), a work whose repeated editions are sufficient evidence of its useful place in the promotion of classical study among the youth of France.  While teaching and lecturing in this beautiful part of his country (the Auvergne region), Bergson found time for private study and original work.  He was engaged on his Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience.  This essay, which, in its English translation, bears the more definite and descriptive title, Time and Free Will, was submitted, along with a short Latin Thesis on Aristotle, for the degree of Docteur-es-Lettres, to which he was admitted by the University of Paris in 1889.  The work was published in the same year by Felix Alcan, the Paris publisher, in his series La Bibliotheque de philosophie contemporaine.

It is interesting to note that Bergson dedicated this volume to Jules Lachelier, then ministre de l’instruction publique, who was an ardent disciple of Ravaisson and the author of a rather important philosophical work Du fondement de l’Induction (1871), who in his view of things endeavoured “to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death, and liberty for fatalism."[Footnote:  Lachelier was born in 1832, Ravaisson in 1813.  Bergson owed much to both of these teachers of the Ecole Normale Superieure.  Cf. his memorial address on Ravaisson, who died in 1900. (See Bibliography under 1904.)]