Daily Inspiration Quote by Henri Bergson

Bergson’s definition of intelligence is almost provocatively unromantic: not contemplation, not wisdom, not even “problem-solving” in the self-help sense, but fabrication. Intelligence, for him, is the mind’s engineering mode, the part of us that turns the world into a workshop where matter is segmented, measured, and reassembled into objects that extend our reach. The kicker is the recursion: “tools to make tools.” He’s not praising clever gadgets so much as naming intelligence as a compounding force, a feedback loop that accelerates itself.

The subtext is a critique disguised as a clean definition. By anchoring intelligence to artificiality, Bergson implies that this faculty thrives on abstraction and simplification. To build, you have to treat reality as stable parts with predictable behaviors. That’s powerful, but it’s also a narrowing of experience: life becomes raw material, not something encountered on its own terms. In Bergson’s wider project (especially his contrast between intelligence and intuition), this is the point. Intelligence excels at the inert and the repeatable; it stumbles when faced with the fluid, the lived, the irreducibly changing.

Context matters: writing amid industrial modernity, Bergson is watching toolmaking become a civilization-scale engine. His line anticipates our current moment, where the “smartest” systems increasingly build the next systems, and the prestige of intelligence gets tethered to whatever scales production fastest. It’s a definition that sounds like a compliment, then quietly asks what gets lost when the human mind is optimized for manufacture.