our duration are one with the successive moments of the act which divides it; if we distinguish in it so many instants, so many parts it indeed possesses; and if our consciousness can only distinguish in a given interval a definite number of elementary acts, if it terminates the division at a given point, there also terminates the divisibility. In vain does our imagination endeavour to go on, to carry division further still, and to quicken, so to speak, the circulation of our inner phenomena: the very effort by which we are trying to effect this further division of our duration lengthens that duration by just so much. And yet we know that millions of phenomena succeed each other while we hardly succeed in counting a few. We know this not from physics alone; the crude experience of the senses allows us to divine it; we are dimly aware of successions in nature much more rapid than those of our internal states. How are we to conceive them, and what is this duration of which the capacity goes beyond all our imagination?
It is not ours, assuredly; but neither is it that homogeneous and impersonal duration, the same for everything and for every one, which flows onward, indifferent and void, external to all that endures. This imaginary homogeneous time is, as we have endeavoured to show elsewhere,[1] an idol of language, a fiction of which the origin is
- ↑ H. Bergson, Time and Free Will. Sonnenschein & Co.
