lyo TIME 



indefinitely. The elimination by washing of the toxic waste 

 products due to the metabolism, suppresses ageing in this 

 fragment of tissue, just as for cancer cells, individual physio- 

 logical time no longer exists or rather is blended into sideral 

 time, 'envelope' time. Like all animal species considered as a 

 whole in their secular evolution, this little piece of flesh registers 

 only the uniformly flowing physical time. Each of its cells, 

 considered separately, probably evolves in the physiological 

 time, the same as all individuals. But everything occurs 

 as if continuous flowing time, the 'wave front' time, which is 

 perceptible to our intelligence but is not our time, played a 

 much more important though more mysterious role than 

 individual time. The death of the individual is of no im- 

 portance. It is the species which counts, and we cannot know 

 if the species is endowed with consciousness. Just as the 

 personality^ of a molecule is abolished in a crystal, so does the 

 individual disappear in the evolution of organized beings, 

 drowned in the mysterious stream which he contributes to form. 

 The conclusion at which we arrive of a 'granular', variable, 

 individual time, differing from the continuous, integral, uni- 

 versal time, has nothing in it which should surprise us. A 

 genial intelligence could have foreseen it, for, since more than a 

 century ago, science has tended to destroy the palpable notion 

 of continuity and to replace it by the impalpable one of dis- 

 continuity. Our senses, which are the intermediaries between 

 the universe and ourselves, translate discontinuity into con- 

 tinuity, air pulsations into sound, groups of waves, accom- 

 panying photons, into light. The first success — foreseen by 

 Democritus — was the demonstration of the granular, fragmen- 

 tary nature of matter. Imperceptible molecules and atoms 

 give us, by reason of their immense number in any body whatso- 

 ever, the impression of continuity. The second was the dis- 

 covery of the electron, which established the granular nature 

 of electricity. The third was the discovery of the quantum 

 of action, which destroyed our clear idea of continuity of 

 energy. Matter, electricity, energy, all our material universe, 

 are but 'envelope' manifestations of statistical phenomena 



