French philosopher Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution was published in 1907 and translated into English in 1911. Very popular at the time, it gives an alternate mechanism for evolution - that it is motivated by an "élan vital" a vital impetus, also graspable as our natural creative urge. It also looks at Bergson's conception of time, a subjective "duration" (rather than the quantifiable time of a clock) that is best understood not through the intellect but through our creative intuition, an idea that influenced Marcel Proust and other modernist thinkers.
