Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was a French philosopher and Nobel laureate whose work centered on duration (durée) — lived, flowing, qualitative time as directly experienced, which he sharply distinguished from the spatialized, clock-measured time of science.

Reality, for Bergson, is fundamentally becoming: a continuous, indivisible creative flux that the intellect, useful for action, freezes into static concepts and discrete objects. To grasp the living movement of reality we need intuition, a sympathetic identification from the inside.

In Creative Evolution (1907) he proposed the élan vital, a vital impetus driving life’s unpredictable, creative diversification against the running-down of matter. Bergson is an important ancestor of the mind-power conviction that reality is a living, creative flow and that direct intuitive consciousness reaches truths the rational intellect misses.

His privileging of intuition over analysis, his vitalist élan vital, and his sense of time as creative becoming fed Romantic, process, and New Age spirituality, and shaped Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin directly.

His account of memory and mind as not reducible to brain states is also cited in consciousness-survival and non-materialist circles. The honest framing: Bergson is a rigorous (if now contested) philosopher, not a manifestation teacher, and the élan vital was scientifically superseded; but his “intuition over intellect” and “reality as creative flow” are core mind-power intuitions given serious philosophical form.