Henri Bergson was born on 18 October 1859 in Paris. A French philosopher, Bergson was famous in the early twentieth century for his ideas on time, memory and consciousness. In works such as Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution he distinguished between measured, clock time and lived duration, and proposed the elan vital as a creative impulse driving evolution. His lectures at the College de France drew large audiences, and his thought influenced writers such as Proust, as well as philosophers such as Deleuze. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, and in 1940 he died shortly after registering as a Jew under the Vichy regime.
Before and after
- 4 August 1859Birth of Knut Hamsun
- 27 August 1859Edwin Drake drills the first commercial oil well
- 1 September 1859The Carrington solar storm
- from 16 October 1859 to 18 October 1859John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry
- 18 October 1859Birth of Henri Bergson
- 20 October 1859Birth of John Dewey
- from 25 October 1859 to 1 January 1862Prussian expedition to East Asia (1859-1862)
- 24 November 1859On the Origin of Species
- 15 December 1859Birth of L. L. Zamenhof
More in Art, literature & culture
- 1792Publication of Dream of the Red Chamber
- 18 September 1851Founding of The New York Times
- 1857Rise of Symbolism
- 1890Rise of Art Nouveau
- 28 December 1895The Lumiere brothers hold the first public film screening
- 1909Rise of Futurism
The era
This moment belongs to the Industrial era (1760 CE to 1914 CE), steam, factories and revolutions. You can also browse everything in the 19th century.