Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was born in Paris, became professor of philosophy at the Collège de France where his lectures drew exceptional crowds, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. He has three major books: Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), Matière et mémoire (1896), and L'évolution créatrice (1907). All three ask the same underlying question: science uses a time adapted to quantities, but lived time will not fit that measure — how is the difference to be thought?

The thesis of Creative Evolution is this: life cannot be explained by a chain of part-on-part causation (mechanism) or as advance toward a preset goal (teleology). Both reduce time to the sum of instantaneous slices laid out in space; but time, or more precisely duration, is a creative passage — it does not contain the future in advance but brings forth new forms moment by moment. The evolution of life shares the structure of duration: a single élan vital, branching in different directions, produces plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates; each branching is a new creation that cannot be deduced from what preceded it.

Bergson's influence outlived his own century. Proust's In Search of Lost Time was built on his account of time; Husserl's analyses of inner time-consciousness were read alongside it; William James found him close to American pragmatism; in the 1960s Deleuze reread Bergson and put duration at the centre of his own philosophy of difference and repetition. Bergson is the important mid-twentieth-century alternative that returns, again and again, to interrupt Heidegger's analysis of time.