Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher of universal evolution, had a young French admirer who meant to finish his system for him. The admirer was in his mid-twenties, teaching philosophy at a secondary school in Clermont-Ferrand, the lycée Blaise-Pascal, and his plan was modest and technical: to give Spencer's mechanism the precision it lacked. He got as far as time, and the plan collapsed.
What mechanics measures, Bergson concluded, is not time. To calculate with time you must first lay it out as a medium whose parts sit side by side and can be counted — which is to say, as space. A clock does not show you an hour; it shows you a hand that has travelled through so much space. Lived time has no parts of that kind: a melody is not a row of notes but each note carrying all the notes before it. Bergson named this real time durée: duration, time as it is undergone rather than counted.
The stake was freedom. The standard case for determinism treats a person as a sequence of separate inner states, each produced by the one before; if the inner life has no separate states, the case has nothing to grip. He submitted that argument as his doctoral thesis in 1888, and it appeared the next year as Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.
Everything afterwards carried the same suspicion into new country. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, in 1900, asked what makes a thing funny and answered that we laugh at rigidity — at the living body caught behaving like a mechanism. Creative Evolution put the objection to biology in 1907. Mechanistic explanation, Bergson argued, accounts for how variations are sifted and not for how anything genuinely new arrives; evolution is one impulse, an élan vital or vital surge, dividing as it advances.
Creative Evolution made him famous outside philosophy. His lectures at the Collège de France, the Paris institution whose courses anyone may walk into, filled past capacity after he took a chair there in 1900; T. S. Eliot, then a young American in Paris, was among those who came. The Catholic Church put three of his books on its Index of Forbidden Books in 1914, the year the Académie française, the national academy of letters, elected him. The Nobel Prize in Literature followed in 1927; arthritis kept him from Stockholm.
Then, on 6 April 1922, Albert Einstein came to a meeting of the Société française de philosophie, the French philosophical society, in Paris, and Bergson argued that relativity had produced a construction, not a replacement for the time we live in. Einstein replied in a few sentences: there was no philosophers' time, only physical time and a psychological time distinct from it. Physicists read the exchange as a rout. That December the physics prize held over from 1921 went to Einstein, at sea on his way to Japan and not there to take it. Presenting it, Svante Arrhenius, chairman of the Nobel committee for physics, noted that Bergson in Paris had challenged the theory; the prize went to the photoelectric effect, not to relativity. Bergson's own book on the dispute, Duration and Simultaneity, came out that year and ran to six editions, the last in 1931. Whether he then suppressed it is disputed: Édouard Le Roy, who succeeded him at the Collège de France, reported that he had refused any further reprinting, but his will names no such wish, and editors reprinted the book in 1968.
In his last years arthritis had taken most of his public life. In 1940 the Vichy government, which had just barred Jews from teaching and public office, offered him an exemption on account of his eminence. He declined it and registered as a Jew. His will instructed that his unpublished papers be destroyed, and his wife and daughter destroyed them.
The eclipse was near-total. Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the two philosophers who set the terms of French thought after the war, took their bearings from German phenomenology, and by the 1960s Bergson was a period name. Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher of the generation after theirs, published Bergsonism in 1966 and put the argument back in circulation. The philosopher Frédéric Worms founded the Société des amis de Bergson in 2006 and directed the first critical edition of the works, published between 2007 and 2012.