Abstract

This essay concerns the contributions to modern consciousness of two intellectuals who reached their maturities in the twilight of the nineteenth century and who helped illuminate the dawn of the twentieth century . William James and Henri Bergson were products of and contributors to a new consciousness of self in a modern world of flux. ;Modern consciousness is defined here as an acute awareness of time and space. Modern consciousness began as an intellectual revolt against scientific positivism, sometimes referred to as determinism, one of the most pervasive concepts of the late nineteenth century, and was aided and abetted by the technological advances in communications and transportation that seemed to make the world move more rapidly and become smaller. ;The focus here begins with a brief historiographic review of the cultural history of France and North America for the spawning grounds of James and Bergson. James's and Bergson's individual intellectual developments are discussed as a prelude to a review of their particular philosophic contributions to a modern consciousness of time and space. ;Why and how James's and Bergson's ideas were so well received in contemporary society is discussed as well as the reactions of both their admirers and their critics. It is asserted that traces of James's ideas involving the exertion of individual mental and physical participation in the new world of flux, and Bergson's explanations of biological science and the creative abilities of individual human beings are found all through the early twentieth century, and still endure today. In brief, William James and Henri Bergson were process philosophers who sought to define being in an age of becoming