Agnostics of the world, unite? I doubt it - they're just like your antsy neighbours!Īt least Shaw identified the Prime Mover with the Life Force.Īnd wasn’t Nietzsche, who started all this haranguing apotheosis of Life ruling over mediocrity in Thus Spake Zarathustra, just trying to feed his disciples with his atheism. (Though you have to factor in to that equation the anomalous fact that over in Ireland, George Bernard Shaw’s socialism and anticlericalism were nourished and strengthened by it!)Īnd many others, in their enthusiasm, rejected God altogether.Īs Tolstoy might have said, all believers look much the same but all agnostics look vastly different.

There, one encounters the spiritual “distractions” that can so easily derail nascent Faith.Ĭreative Evolution was seen as just such a False Dawn to settled 19-century Christians.īut to young and depressive Jacques and Raissa Maritain, it marked the Dawn of insight that led to their induction into the Church. The THIRD Stair evokes the infamously treacherous False Dawn one thinks one sees, as a believer, during what a few centuries later would be described by Juan de la Cruz as the Dark Night of the Soul. Eliot penned these pensive lines in the Thirties, he meant by ‘stair’ The Stairway of Perfection, an amazing mystical book written by the great medieval author Walter Hilton. For example, Bergson's term 'duration' refers to a more individual, subjective experience of time, as opposed to mathematical, objectively measurable 'clock time.' In Creative Evolution, Bergson suggests that the experience of time as 'duration' can best be understood through creative intuition, not through intellect.DISTRACTION, MUSIC OF THE FLUTE - STOPS AND STEPS OF THE MIND The book also develops concepts of time (offered in Bergson's earlier work) which significantly influenced modernist writers and thinkers such as Marcel Proust. The book was very popular in the early decades of the twentieth century, before the Neodarwinian synthesis was developed. The book provides an alternate explanation for Darwin's mechanism of evolution, suggesting that evolution is motivated by an élan vital, a 'vital impetus' that can also be understood as humanity's natural creative impulse. Its English translation appeared in 1911. Translated by Arthur Mitchell (1872 - 1953)Ĭreative Evolution (French: L'Évolution créatrice) is a 1907 book by French philosopher Henri Bergson. Download cover art Download CD case insert Evolution Creatrice

Creative evolution by henri bergson