"HENRI LOUIS BERGSON was born in Paris, October 18, 1859. He entered the Ecole normale in 1878, and was admitted agrg de philosophie in 1881 and docteur s lettres in 1889. After holding professorships in various provincial and Parisian lyces, he became maitre de confrences at the Ecole normale suprieure in 1897, and since 1900 has been professor at the Collge de France. In 1901 he became a member of the Institute on his election to the Acadmie des Sciences morales et politiques.
A full list of Professor Bergson's works is given in the appended bibliography. In making the following translation of his Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience I have had the great advantage of his cooperation at every stage, and the aid which he has given has been most generous and untiring. The book itself was worked out and written during the years 1883 to 1887 and was originally published in 1889. The foot-notes in the French edition contain a certain number of references to French translations of English works- In the present translation I am responsible for citing these references from the original English. This will account for the fact that editions are sometimes referred to which have appearedsubsequently to 1889. I have also added fairly extensive marginal summaries and a full index.
In France the Essai is already in its seventh edition. Indeed, one of the most striking facts about Professor Bergson's works is the extent to which they have appealed not only to the professional philosophers, but also to the ordinary cultivated public. The method which he pursues is not the conceptual and abstract method which has been the dominant tradition in philosophy. For him reality is not to be reached by any elaborate construction of thought : it is given in immediate experience as a flux, a continuous process of becoming, to be grasped by intuition, by sympathetic insight. Concepts break up the continuous flow of reality into parts external to one another, they further the interests of language and social life and are useful primarily for practical purposes. But they give us nothing of the life and movement of reality ; rather, by substituting for this an artificial reconstruction, a patchwork of dead fragments, they lead to the difficulties which have always beset the intellectualist philosophy, and which on its premises are insoluble. Instead of attempting a solution in the intellectualist sense."
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