Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson was a French-Jewish philosopher and Nobel Prize winner in Literature, whose third major work, "Creative Evolution", provided an alternate explanation for Darwin's mechanism of evolution. First published in French in 1907 and translated into English in 1911, the work proposes an orthogenesis or progressive theory of evolution in which Bergson argues that organisms innately evolve towards an end goal. Bergson focuses on four key steps...

"Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic" is French philosopher Henri Bergson's treatise on laughter and the timeless role of comedy in human society. Originally published in three parts in French in 1900 and translated into English in 1924, Bergson makes three essential observations about laughter and comedy. First, that comedy is a necessary human behavior and acts as a sort of caricature or parody of essential human activities and behaviors....

Before the dawn of history, mankind was engaged in the study of dreaming. The wise man among the ancients was preeminently the interpreter of dreams. The ability to interpret successfully or plausibly was the quickest road to royal favor, as Joseph and Daniel found it to be; failure to give satisfaction in this respect led to banishment from court or death. When a scholar laboriously translates a cuneiform tablet dug up from a Babylonian mound, where...

Bergson argues for free will by showing that the arguments against it come from a confusion of different conceptions of time. As opposed to physicists' idea of measurable time, life is perceived in human experience as a continuous and immeasurable flow rather than as a succession of marked-off states of consciousness.

This collection comprises first of all, two introductory essays written especially for it, and consequently heretofore unpublished. They make up a third of the volume. The rest are articles or lectures, mostly out of print, which appeared in France or in other countries. Taken as a whole, they date from the period between 1903 and 1923. They bear mainly upon the method I believe should be recommended to the philosopher. To go back to the origin of...

Fourteen-year-old Victoria attracts the attention of the boy she likes, but discovers her life is still full of problems.