Bergson, Henri 1859-1941
French philosopher and Nobel Prize winner

Born in Paris, the son of a Polish Jewish musician and an English mother, he was educated in Paris at the Lyc�e Condorcet and the �cole Normale Sup�rieure (1878-81). He became professor at the Coll�ge de France (1900-24), and was an original thinker who became something of a cult figure. He contrasted the fundamental reality of the dynamic flux of consciousness with the inert physical world of discrete objects, which was a convenient fiction for the mechanistic descriptions of science. The �lan vital, or 'creative impulse', not a deterministic natural selection, is at the heart of evolution, and intuition, not analysis, reveals the real world of process and change. His own writings are literary, suggestive and analogical rather than philosophical in the modern sense, and he greatly influenced such writers as Marcel Proust (to whom he was connected by marriage), Georges Sorel and Samuel Butler. His most important works were Essai sur les donn�es imm�diates de la conscience (1889, Eng trans Time and Freewill, 1910), Mati�re et M�moire (1896, Eng trans Matter and Memory, 1911) and L'�volution Cr�atrice (1907, Eng trans Creative Evolution, 1911). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927.