The Henri Bergson Megapack. Henri Bergson

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      The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack*

      The Third R. Austin Freeman Megapack*

      The Jacques Futrelle Megapack

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      The Second Randall Garrett Megapack

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      The Second Murray Leinster Megapack***

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      The A. Merritt Megapack*

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      * Not available in the United States

      ** Not available in the European Union

      ***Out of print.

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CREATIVE EVOLUTION

      Translated by Arthur Mitchell, Ph.D.

      TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

      In the writing of this English translation of Professor Bergson’s most important work, I was helped by the friendly interest of Professor William James, to whom I owe the illumination of much that was dark to me as well as the happy rendering of certain words and phrases for which an English equivalent was difficult to find. His sympathetic appreciation of Professor Bergson’s thought is well known, and he has expressed his admiration for it in one of the chapters of A Pluralistic Universe. It was his intention, had he lived to see the completion of this translation, himself to introduce it to English readers in a prefatory note.

      I wish to thank my friend, Dr. George Clarke Cox, for many valuable suggestions.

      I have endeavored to follow the text as closely as possible, and at the same time to preserve the living union of diction and thought. Professor Bergson has himself carefully revised the whole work. We both of us wish to acknowledge the great assistance of Miss Millicent Murby. She has kindly studied the translation phrase by phrase, weighing each word, and her revision has resulted in many improvements.

      But above all we must express our acknowledgment to Mr. H. Wildon Carr, the Honorary Secretary of the Aristotelian Society of London, and the writer of several studies of “Evolution Creatrice.”[1] We asked him to be kind enough to revise the proofs of our work. He has done much more than revise them: they have come from his hands with his personal mark in many places. We cannot express all that the present work owes to him.

      ARTHUR MITCHELL

      Harvard University

      INTRODUCTION

      The history of the evolution of life, incomplete as it yet is, already reveals to us how the intellect has been formed, by an uninterrupted progress, along a line which ascends through the vertebrate series up to man. It shows us in the faculty of understanding an appendage of the faculty of acting, a more and more precise, more and more complex and supple adaptation of the consciousness of living beings to the conditions of existence that are made for them. Hence should result this consequence that our intellect, in the narrow sense of the word, is intended to secure the perfect fitting of our body to its environment, to represent the relations of external things among themselves—in short, to think matter. Such will indeed be one of the conclusions of the present essay. We shall see that the human intellect feels at home among inanimate objects, more especially among solids, where our action finds its fulcrum and our industry its tools; that our concepts have been formed on the model of solids; that our logic is, pre-eminently, the logic of solids; that, consequently, our intellect triumphs in geometry, wherein is revealed the kinship of logical thought with unorganized matter, and where the intellect has only to follow its natural movement, after the lightest possible contact with СКАЧАТЬ