The Creative Mind: With a Chapter from Bergson and his Philosophy by J. Alexander Gunn

Time as it is lived rather than measured: the late collection in which Henri Bergson set out the essays and lectures that best explain his method, with a long new introduction.

Bergson (1859–1941) was the most widely read philosopher in Europe before the First World War and took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. His subject was duration – time as consciousness actually meets it, flowing and undivided – and his case was that the intellect, made for handling matter, has to be joined by intuition if anything is to be understood from the inside. La Pensée et le mouvant, his last book, appeared in 1934 and drew together work from 1903 to 1923: 'The Possible and the Real', 'Philosophical Intuition', 'The Perception of Change', the much-quoted 'Introduction to Metaphysics', and studies of Claude Bernard, William James and Félix Ravaisson.

Mabelle L. Andison's English translation came out in 1946 as The Creative Mind. With the two introductions Bergson wrote specially for the volume, on how truth grows and on how to state a problem properly, it is the nearest thing he left to a guide to his own thinking, and the usual place for a new reader to begin.

This edition features:

• The full Andison translation of Bergson's final collection, first published in English in 1946
• Two introductions written by Bergson for the volume, on truth and on how to state a problem
• 'Introduction to Metaphysics', his best-known statement of intuition as a way of knowing
• Essays on Claude Bernard, William James and Félix Ravaisson, showing where his thinking came from
• A chapter from J. Alexander Gunn's 1920 study Bergson and His Philosophy, added as a way in

Read & Co. Books is proud to return The Creative Mind to print in a new edition, for readers coming to Bergson for the first time and for those who keep going back to him.