Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson was a French philosopher whose work centered on time, memory, and consciousness. He distinguished "clock time," measured in uniform units, from what he called "duration" (durée) — time as it is actually lived and felt, flowing and indivisible. In Creative Evolution he proposed the élan vital, a "vital impulse" he offered as a way to think about life's development beyond purely mechanical accounts. He taught at the Collège de France, where his lectures drew large public audiences, and shaped debates in psychology, literature, and metaphysics. He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature (the prize had been reserved, and the ceremony took place in 1928). He remained in occupied Paris until his death in 1941.