 For Bergson, the notion of life mixes together two opposite senses, which must be differentiated and then led into a genuine unity. On the one hand, it is clear from Bergson’s earlier works that life is the absolute temporal movement informed by duration and retained in memory. But, on the other hand, he has shown that life also consists in the practical necessities imposed on our body and accounting for our habitual mode of knowing in spatial terms. More specifically then, Bergson’s project in Creative Evolution is to offer a philosophy capable of accounting both for the continuity of all living beings—as creatures—and for the discontinuity implied in the evolutionary quality of this creation. Bergson starts out by showing that the only way in which the two senses of life may be reconciled (without being collapsed) is to examine real life, the real evolution of the species, that is, the phenomenon of change and its profound causes. His argument consists of four main steps. First, he shows that there must be an original common impulse which explains the creation of all living species; this is his famous vital impulse (élan vital). Second, the diversity resulting from evolution must be accounted for as well. If the original impulse is common to all life, then there must also be a principle of divergence and differentiation that explains evolution; this is Bergson’s tendency theory. Third, the two main diverging tendencies that account for evolution can ultimately be identified as instinct on the one hand and intelligence on the other. Human knowledge results from the form and the structure of intelligence. We learned from “The Introduction to Metaphysics” that intelligence consists precisely in an analytic, external, hence essentially practical and spatialized approach to the world. Unlike instinct, human intelligence is therefore unable to attain to the essence of life in its duration. The paradoxical situation of humanity (the only species that wants to know life is also the only one that cannot do so) must therefore be overcome. So, fourth, the effort of intuition is what allows us to place ourselves back within the original creative impulse so as to overcome the numerous obstacles that stand in the way of true knowledge (which are instantiated in the history of metaphysics). We are going to look at each of these four steps.