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In 1927 the Swedish Academy gave the Nobel Prize in Literature to a philosopher, Henri Bergson, “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented.” Rheumatism kept him from travelling to Stockholm, so he sent a text instead. By then he had spent two decades lecturing at the Collège de France, had been elected to the Académie française, and had argued in public with Einstein about the nature of time. His subject, from his doctoral thesis of 1889 to his last books in the 1930s, was the same: time as we live it, which he called duration (la durée), and what happens when we try to measure it like space. This guide covers his nine key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 9 key books · 1889–1934 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Henri Bergson’s best-known books are Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889), Matter and Memory (1896), Laughter (1900), Creative Evolution (1907) and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). Start with Laughter, his short book on the comic; the list below gives the French originals, the English translators and what each book argues.
Where to Start with Henri Bergson
If you want a short, concrete way in
→ Laughter (1900) — three essays on what makes us laugh.
If you want his most famous book
→ Creative Evolution (1907) — evolution and the élan vital.
If you want the idea everything else grows from
→ Time and Free Will (1889) — duration and free will, his doctoral thesis.
If you want his method in one essay
→ An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) — intuition against analysis.
9 Henri Bergson Books, in Order
Time and Free Will
Published in French as Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, the book was his doctoral thesis at the University of Paris. It argues that we wrongly picture inner life as if it were laid out in space, as a series of separate, countable states, and that real time, duration, is a flowing whole. Once that confusion is cleared up, Bergson argues, the old debate about free will looks different. English translation by F. L. Pogson (1910).
Matter and Memory
Matière et mémoire: essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit takes on the relation between body and mind through the study of memory. Bergson treats the brain as an organ of action rather than a store of memories, and separates habit memory, a learned skill, from the memory that keeps the past itself. English translation by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (1911).
Laughter
Le Rire gathers three essays on why we laugh. Bergson’s answer is that the comic is “something mechanical encrusted upon the living”: a person who moves, speaks or thinks like a machine. He tests the idea on gestures, situations, wordplay and character comedy. English translation by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (1911).
An Introduction to Metaphysics
A long essay, Introduction à la métaphysique, setting out his method: analysis, which breaks a thing into fixed concepts, against intuition, which tries to follow it from the inside. It was later collected in The Creative Mind. English translation by the poet and critic T. E. Hulme (1913).
Creative Evolution
L’Évolution créatrice reads evolution as a creative process driven by a vital impetus, the élan vital, and rejects both pure mechanism and the idea of a fixed end point. Its last chapter criticises what Bergson calls the cinematographic habit of thought, which rebuilds movement out of still frames. It made him famous well beyond academic philosophy. English translation by Arthur Mitchell (1911).
Mind-Energy
L’Énergie spirituelle: essais et conférences collects lectures and essays from the two decades after Matter and Memory, on consciousness, the soul and the body, intellectual effort and dreams. It is the easiest place to see his ideas tried out in front of a live audience. English translation by H. Wildon Carr (1920).
Duration and Simultaneity
Durée et simultanéité: à propos de la théorie d’Einstein appeared months after his exchange with Einstein in Paris in April 1922. It accepts relativity as physics but argues that the theory’s clock-time leaves out duration, time as it is lived. A second edition (1923) added three appendices. English translation by Leon Jacobson (1965).
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, his last major book, came 25 years after Creative Evolution. It contrasts a closed morality of social obligation with an open morality inspired by exceptional individuals, and static religion with the dynamic religion of the mystics. English translation by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, with W. Horsfall Carter (1935).
The Creative Mind
La Pensée et le mouvant: essais et conférences collects his writing on method: two long introductory essays, An Introduction to Metaphysics and his Oxford lectures of 1911 on the perception of change. It also contains the text he sent to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize. English translation by Mabelle L. Andison.
In What Order to Read Henri Bergson
Bergson’s books build on each other: the idea of duration from Time and Free Will runs through everything after it, and Creative Evolution assumes you know it. Read in publication order if you want to see the system grow; read Laughter first if you want a way in that does not require any of it.
An Introduction to Metaphysics works well before the longer books, because it explains in a few dozen pages what he means by intuition. Leave Duration and Simultaneity until after Time and Free Will: it is an argument about relativity and only makes sense once you know what he means by duration.
A reading path
1. Laughter (1900)
2. An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903)
3. Time and Free Will (1889)
4. Creative Evolution (1907)
5. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932)
Everything Else Henri Bergson Published
Beyond the 9 key books: 5 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Early work, lectures and posthumous collections
5
5 books · 1884–1972
- 1884Extraits de Lucrècea school edition of Lucretius with his study; in English as The Philosophy of Poetry: The Genius of Lucretius (1959)
- 1911La Perception du changementtwo lectures given at Oxford on 26 and 27 May 1911
- 1915La Signification de la guerrea wartime address; in English as The Meaning of the War (1915)
- 1957Écrits et parolescollected shorter texts, in three volumes (1957–1959)
- 1972Mélangeshis Latin thesis on Aristotle’s idea of place, Durée et simultanéité, letters and documents
The years · 1859–1941
Quick facts about Henri Bergson
- Known for
- Bergson is known for his philosophy of duration, the idea that time as we live it is a continuous flow that clock-time and spatial thinking cannot capture.
- 1859
- Born in Paris
- 1889
- Doctorate; Time and Free Will
- 1900
- Joins the Collège de France
- 1927
- Nobel Prize in Literature
- 1941
- Dies in occupied Paris
- Born
- 18 October 1859, Paris; his father, Michał Bergson, was a Polish-Jewish composer and pianist
- Died
- 4 January 1941, in German-occupied Paris
- Education
- École normale supérieure; agrégation in philosophy (1881); doctorate (1889)
- Taught
- Collège de France, 1900–1920 (chair of modern philosophy from 1904)
- Married
- Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, in 1891; Proust was best man
- Honours
- Académie française (elected 1914); Nobel Prize in Literature (1927); Grand-Croix of the Légion d’honneur (1930)
- Public role
- President of the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, 1920–1925
The red mark is 1907: Creative Evolution, the book that made him famous.
How Henri Bergson Writes: Philosophy in Images
Bergson is one of very few philosophers to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the Swedish Academy’s citation praised his presentation as much as his ideas. He writes without technical vocabulary and argues through images: a melody whose notes melt into each other, a film reel that rebuilds movement from still frames and a person who moves or speaks like a machine.
His method is to take a familiar problem, free will, memory, evolution, morality, and show that it rests on a confusion between time and space. An Introduction to Metaphysics names the alternative: intuition, an effort to follow a thing from the inside rather than cut it into fixed concepts. Each later book applies the same move to a new subject, which is why reading them in order pays off.
His influence reached far beyond philosophy. William James called him “such a genius intellectually” after they met in London in 1908; he shaped the Catholic writers Charles Péguy and Jacques Maritain; and Gilles Deleuze’s Le Bergsonisme (1966) revived interest in his work.
Frequently asked questions about Henri Bergson’s books
How many books has Henri Bergson written?
Nine are the key books on this page, from Time and Free Will (1889) to The Creative Mind (1934). Besides these he published an early school edition of Lucretius, his Oxford lectures, wartime addresses and shorter texts, and after his death his letters, lecture courses and collected writings appeared in several volumes.
What are Henri Bergson’s books in order?
Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896), Laughter (1900), An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), Creative Evolution (1907), Mind-Energy (1919), Duration and Simultaneity (1922), The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) and The Creative Mind (1934). The years are those of the French first editions.
Where should I start with Henri Bergson?
With Laughter (1900), three short essays on the comic that show his way of thinking with concrete examples. After that, An Introduction to Metaphysics explains his method in one essay, and Time and Free Will sets out the idea of duration on which everything else rests.
What is Henri Bergson’s most famous book?
Creative Evolution (L’Évolution créatrice, 1907), which introduced the élan vital, the vital impetus he saw behind evolution. It made him famous outside academic philosophy. Time and Free Will and Laughter are the other titles most often read today.
Why did Henri Bergson win the Nobel Prize in Literature?
He received the 1927 prize “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented”, so for his work as a whole rather than one book. He could not travel to Stockholm because of rheumatism and sent a text, later included in The Creative Mind.
What was the debate between Bergson and Einstein?
On 6 April 1922, at the Société française de philosophie in Paris, Bergson argued that relativity was valid as physics but could not account for duration, time as it is lived. Einstein replied briefly that there was physical time and psychological time but no third kind: “the time of the philosophers does not exist”. Bergson set out his case in Duration and Simultaneity later that year. Historians still disagree about how much the exchange affected views of relativity, including the wording of Einstein’s 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was awarded for the photoelectric effect.
What is duration (la durée) in Bergson?
Time as it is lived from the inside: a continuous flow in which each moment carries the past with it, rather than a line of separate, measurable instants. Bergson argued that clock-time and everyday language turn duration into something like space, and that many problems in philosophy come from that mistake.
Was Henri Bergson Jewish, and did he convert to Catholicism?
He was Jewish by birth. In his will of 1937 he wrote that his thinking had brought him nearer to Catholicism, “in which I saw the perfect complement to Judaism”, but he did not convert because he did not want to seem to abandon the persecuted. When Jews in occupied France had to register in 1940, he registered, writing “Academic. Philosopher. Nobel Prize winner. Jew.” He died in Paris in January 1941.
Was Henri Bergson related to Marcel Proust?
By marriage. In 1891 Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Proust, and Proust was best man at the wedding.
Footnotes
- Henri Bergson — Wikipedia
- Einstein–Bergson debate — Wikipedia
- Henri Bergson: Bibliography — NobelPrize.org
- Henri Bergson — Encyclopædia Britannica
- Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell (1911) — Mead Project, Brock University
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
— Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), translated by Arthur Mitchell (1911)
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