[citation needed] It is a hypothetical explanation for evolution and development of organisms, which Bergson linked closely with consciousness – the intuitive perception of experience and the flow of inner time.
[1] Distant anticipations of Bergson can be found in the work of the pre-Christian Stoic philosopher Posidonius, who postulated a "vital force" emanated by the sun to all living creatures on the Earth's surface, and in that of Zeno of Elea.
No longer considered a mystical, elusive force acting on brute matter, as it was in the vitalist debates of the late 19th century, élan vital denotes for Deleuze an internal force,[4] a substance in which the distinction between organic and inorganic matter vanishes, and the emergence of life cannot be discerned.
In 1912 Beatrice M. Hinkle wrote that Carl Gustav Jung's conception of libido was similar to Bergson's élan vital.
There was Bergson’s élan vital—there was assimilation causing life to exert as much pressure, though embodied here in the shape of men, as it has ever done in the earliest year of evolution: there was the driving force of progress