Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.

Meaning of the quote

The quote says that intelligence is the ability to create things that are not natural, like tools that can be used to make other tools. This means that intelligence allows us to invent and build objects that can help us make even more things. The key idea is that intelligence lets us use our minds to produce tools and other artificial objects that make our lives easier and help us do more.

About Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson was a renowned French philosopher who made significant contributions to the fields of analytic and continental philosophy in the early 20th century. He is known for his arguments that immediate experience and intuition are more important than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “rich and vitalizing ideas.”

More about the author

More quotes from Henri Bergson

I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body: they transmit movement to it.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

When we make the cerebral state the beginning of an action, and in no sense the condition of a perception, we place the perceived images of things outside the image of our body, and thus replace perception within the things themselves.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

For life is tendency, and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions among which its impetus is divided.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

We regard intelligence as man’s main characteristic and we know that there is no superiority which intelligence cannot confer on us, no inferiority for which it cannot compensate.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

To perceive means to immobilize… we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)

The motive power of democracy is love.

Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941)