Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson was a French philosopher who argued that lived time — duration (durée) — is qualitatively different from measured, spatial time. He criticised mechanistic science for falsifying the continuous flow of consciousness and championed intuition as the means to grasp reality.

Bergson's Creative Evolution proposed that life is driven by an élan vital, a creative impulse irreducible to mechanical causation. His philosophy of time and memory influenced Proust, William James, and Whitehead, and his critique of spatialised time anticipated phenomenological accounts of consciousness.