Let us conclude, then, that our science is not only dis- tinguished from ancient science io this, that it seeks laws, nor even in this, that its laws set forth relations between magnitudes: we must add that the magnitude to which we wish to be able to relate all others is time, and that modem science must be defined pre-eminentiy by Us aspiralion to taJce time as an iTidependent variable. But with what time has it to do?
We have said before, and we cannot repeat too often, that the science of matter proceeds like ordinary know- ledge. It perfects this knowledge, increases its precision and its scope, but it works in Ihe same direction and puts the same mechanism into play. If, therefore, ordinary knowledge, by rca,son of the cinematographical mechamsm to which it is subjected, forbears to follow becoming in so far as becoming is moving, the science of matter renounces it equally. No doubt, it distinguishes as great a number of moments as we wish in the interval of time it considers. However small the intervals may be at which it stops, it authorizes us to divide them again if necessary. In con- trast with ancient science, which stopped at certain so- called essential moments, it is occupied indifferently with any moment whatever. But it always considers moments, always virtual stopping-places, always, in short, immobili*
ties. y\
^ a fliiT ,
Modern Science 337
Which amounts to saying that real time, regarded as a flux, or, in other words, as the very mobility of being, escapes the hold of scientific knowledge. We have already tried to establish this point in a former work. We alluded to it again in the first chapter of this book. But it is necessary to revert to it once more, in order to clear up misunder-
spondences of this kind. We have therefore counted simultaneities; we have not concerned ourselves with the flux that goes from one to another. The proof of this is that I can, at discretion, vary the rapidity of the flux of the universe in regard to a consciousness that is independent of it and that would perceive the variation by the quite qualitative /eeZiTig that it would have of it: whatever the variation had been, since the movement of T would partici- pate in this variation, I should have nothing to change in my equations nor in the numbers that figure in them.
Let us go further, Suppose that the rapidity of tjie flux becomes inflnite. Imagine, as we said in the first pages . of this book, that the trajectory of the mobile T is given at once, and that the whole history, past, present and future, of the material universe is spread out instantaneously in space. The same mathematical correspondences will subsist between the moments of the history of the world unfolded like a fan, so to speak, and the divisions Tp Tj, T,, ... of the line which will be called, by definition, "the course of time." In the eyes of science nothing will have changed. But if, time thus spreading itself out in space and succession becoming juxtaposition, science has noth- ing to change in what it tells us, we must conclude that, in what it tells us, it takes account neither of succession in what of it is specific nor of ti?ne in what there is in it that is fluent. It has no sign to express what strikes our con- sciousness in succession and duration. It no more applies to becoming, so far as that is moving, than the bridges thrown here and there across the stream follow the water that flows under their arches.
Yet succession exists; I am conscious of it; it ia a fact.
When a physical process is going on before my eyes, my
perception and my inclination have nothing to do with
accelerating or retarding it. What is important to the
Modern Science 339
physicist is the number of units of duration the process fills; he does not concern himself about the units themselves and that is why the successive states of the world might be spread out all at once in space without his having to change anything in his science or to cease talking about time. But for us, conscious beings, it is the units that matter, for we do not count extremities of intervals, we feel and Uve the inten,'al3 themselves. Now, we are con- scious of these intervals as of definite inter\'als. Let me come back again to the sugar in my glass of water;' why must I wait for it to melt? While the duration of the phenomenon is relative for the physicist, since it is reduced to a certain number of units of time and the units them- selves are indifferent, this duration is an absolute for my consciousness, for it coincides with a certain degree of impatience which is rigorously dctennined. Whence comes this determination? What is it that obliges me to wait, and to wait for a certain length of psychical duration which is forced upon me, over which I have no power? If succession, in so far as distinct from mere juxtaposition, has no real efficacy, if time is not a kind of force, why does the universe unfold its successive states with a velocity which, in regard to ray consciousness, is a veritable abso- lute? Why with this particular velocity rather than any other? Why not with an infinite velocity? \\Tiy, in other words, is not everything given at once, as on the film of the cinematograph? The more I consider this point, the more it seems to me that, if the future is bound to sxicceed the present instead of lieing given alongside of it, it is because the future is not altogether determined at the present moment, and that if the time taken up by this succession is something other than a number, if it has for the con- sciousness that is installed in it abeolute value and reality,
it, not t class '
it ifl because there is unceasingly being created in it, indeed in any such artificiatly isolated system as a gli of sugared water, but in the concrete whole of which every such system forms part, something unforeseeable and new. This duration may not be the fact of matter itself, but that of the life which reascends the course of matter; the two movements are none the less mutually dependent upon each other. The duration of the universe must therefore be one with the latitude of creation which can find place in it.
When a child plays at reconstructing a picture by putting together the separate pieces in a puzzle game, the more he practices, the more and more quickly he succeeds. The reconstruction was, moreover, instantaneous, the child found it ready-made, when he opened the box on leaving the shop. The operation, therefore, does not require a deSnite time, and indeed; theoretically, it does not require any time. That is because the result is given. It is be- cause the picture is already created, and because to obtain it requires only a work of recomposing and rearranging — a work that can be supposed going faster and faster, and even infinitely fast, up to the point of being instantaneous. But, to the artist who creates a picture by drawing it from the depths of his soul, time is no longer an accessory; it is not an interval that may be lengthened or shortened with- out the content being altered. The duration of his work is part and parcel of his work. To contract or to dilate it would be to modify both the psychical evolution that fills it and the invention which is its goal. The time taken up by the invention, is one with the invention itself. It is the progress of a thought which is changing in the degree and measure that it is taking form. It is a vital process, ■omething like the ripening of an idea.
The painter is before his canvas, the colore are on the palette, the modcJ is sitting — all this we see, and also we
know the painter's style: do we foresee what will appear on the canvas? We possess the elements of the problem; we know in an abstract way, how it will be solved, for the portrait will surely resemble the model and will surely resemble also the artist; but the concrete solution brings with it that unforeseeable nothing which is everything
_ in a work of art. And it is this nothing that takes time. Nought as matter, it creates itself as form. The sprouting and flowering of this form are stretched out on an un- shrinkable duration, which is one with their essence. So of the works of nature. Their novelty arises from an inter- nal impetus which is progress or succession, which confers on succession a peculiar virtue or which owes to succes- sion the whole of its virtue — which, at any rate, makes succession, or continuity of inlerpenetration in time, irre- ducible to a mere instantaneous juxtaposition in space, This is why the idea of reading in a present state of the material universe the future of living forms, and of unfold- ing now their history yet to come, involves a veritable absurdity. But this absurdity is difficult to bring out, because our memory is accustomed to place alongside of each other, in an ideal space, the terms it perceives in turn, because it always represents past succession in the form of
I juxtaposition. It is able to do so, indeed, just because the past belongs to that which is already invented, to the dead, and no longer to creation and to Ufe, Then, as the succes- sion to come will end by being a succession past, we per- suade ourselves that the duration to come admits of the same treatment as past duration, that it is, even now, un- rollable, that the future is there, rolled up, already painted on the canvas. An illusion, no doubt, but an illusion that _ is natural, ineradicable, and that will last as long as the human mind !
Time is invention or it is TWthing at aU. But of time-
invention physics can take no account, restricted as it is to the cinematographical method. It is limited to count- ing simultaneities between the events that make up thJa time and the positions of the mobile T on its trajectory. It detaches these events from the whole, which at every moment puts on a new form and which communicates to them somethiDg of its novelty. It considers them in the abstract, such as they would be outside of the living whole, that is to say, in a time unrolled in space. It retains only the events or systems of events that can be thus isolated without being made to undergo too profound a deformation, because only these lend themselves to the application of its method. Our physics dates from the day when it was known how to isolate such systems. To siun up, white modem physics is distinguished from ancient physics by the fact thai it considers any moment of time whatever, it rests altogether on a sybstitution of time-length for time-invention. It seems then that, parallel to this physics, a second kind of knowledge ought to have grown up, which could have retained what physics allowed to escape. On the 8ux itself of duration science neither would nor could lay hold, bound as it was to the cinematographical method. This second kind of knowledge would have set the cinemato- graphical method aside. It would have called upon the mind to renounce its most cherished habits. It is within becoming that it would have transported us by an effort of sympathy. We should no longer be asking where a mov- ing body will be, what shape a system wiU take, through what state a change will pass at a given moment : the mo- ments of time, which are only arrests of our attention, would no longer exist; it is the flow of time, it is the very flux of the real that we should be trying to follow. The first kind of knowledge has the advantage of enabling us to foresee the future and of making us in some measure masters