The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought. - Bergson

It excites me to see Bergson tasks philosophy with the ambitious "expanding our perception of the universe". For Bergson, our intellects are unavoidably bound by our inherent tendencies to spatialize the universe and have geometrical representations of the universe. But this is only one aspect of the experience of life - there are other facts, discovered by the 19th century progress in biology, that would challenge our normal modes of thinking: the concept of unity, multiplicity, mechanical causality. for example, the definition of a living organism challenges our boundaries of individuality.

when evolution happens in divergent lines of life, Bergson thinks this goes against the Aristotlian thought of a tree-like, unilinear, sprouting structure of life. Life science is peculiar in the sense that we'd make fatal mistakes when we try to "shrink nature to the measure of our ideas".

How, though, is it possible to think beyond the human condition and outside of its particular framing of reality? Bergson's answer is a radical one: bring human intellect in contact with other forms of life-consciousness

In the introduction to Creative Evolution he tackles the objection that may be raised against the project he invites us to pursue: will it not be through our intellect and our intellect alone that we perceive the other forms of consciousness? In answer to this objection he points out that this would be the case if we were pure intellects, but the fact is, he thinks, we are not. Around our conceptual and logical modes of thought, and that have moulded themselves on certain aspects and tendencies of the real, there remains a vague nebulosity that is made of the same substance out of which the luminous nucleus we call the intellect has been fashioned. Here we shall find, he thinks and hopes, certain powers – powers of insight, vision, and perception – the nature of which we have only an indistinct feeling when we remain shut up in ourselves and exist as closed beings

Life appears to have at least a twofold sense in Bergson, denoting (i) a current of creative energy that is precipitated into matter and wrests from it what it can; (ii) the durational phenomena of organic creation as outlined above.