ABSTRACT
Bergson’s theory of two orders has not attracted the attention that I believe it deserves. His inclination towards intuitive knowledge and his enthusiastic poetic style, qualities that won him the Nobel Prize for literature, aroused suspicions of mysticism, especially in the environment of analytical philosophy. However, good and fruitful ideas should not be ignored simply because they carry certain associations. As far as I can ascertain, Bergson, in his Creative Evolution, was the first to present an explicit theory of two orders. The distinction is presented mainly in Creative Evolution, Chapter III. Bergson appears to be following Pascal’s distinction between the mathematical and the intuitive mind (the first aphorisms of Pascal’s Pensées).
