CHEMICAL CLOCK I7I 



resulting from the play of isolated elements which are them- 

 selves deprived of dimensions. There is therefore nothing 

 astonishing in the fact that we are brought to the conclusion 

 that the very essence of time is granular and that its continuity 

 is only the statistical appearance given it by individuals so as 

 to class all the other external statistical phenomena in their 

 consciousness and in their memory. ^ 



We know that the major laws which govern our material 

 bodies — Newton's law, the electrostatic law of Coulomb, and 

 others — apply only at a certain scale, and cease to apply at the 

 electronic scale. We see that the law of flow, the succession of 

 our internal phenomena, is also different from the law of flow 

 of the external phenomena of the universe. Must one con- 

 sider this fact as the indication of a difference of magnitude 

 between our short individual period and the immense periods 

 of the universe? Must we see a proof of the existence of such 

 periods? Who knows? All that we can say at present is that 

 our crude language, lacking appropriate v»'ords, translates this 

 knowledge into improper, inadequate expressions such as: 



^ It is evidently absurd to speak of 'the very essence of time'. 

 Space, time, energy, are beyond our terminology. However, to dis- 

 tinguish between these two concepts, of continuity and discontinuity, 

 we are forced to employ current expressions. All our experience and 

 all our science lead us to the admission that continuity exists nowhere, 

 and that one of the roles of consciousness is to manufacture con- 

 tinuity from discontinuity. The notion of continuity is essentially 

 human. It is normal that this tendency of our consciousness should 

 have been applied to time as well as to the material universe. How- 

 ever, if all our universe is discontinuous we nevertheless observe the 

 existence of many phenomena the continuity of which is indisputable 

 and likewise based on elementary discontinuous phenomena. The 

 persistence of species, for instance, or the manifestations of 'the spirit 

 of the hive', in bees as well as in ants and termites. M. Jean Rostand 

 could give us many examples borrowed from insects. Here, also, 

 something continuous is born in our consciousness from discon- 

 tinuity, but from a discontinuity of quite another order of magnitude 

 than electronic, quantic, or even molecular discontinuity. There is 

 nothing shocking in speaking of our physiological time as a constitu- 

 tive element of our concept of a uniformly flowing time. The latter 

 is perhaps a mere product of our intelligence. It is, moreover, 

 possible that outside of the major tendencies cited above (persistence 

 of species, etc.), thought alone is continuous. But this would be very 

 difficult to prove. 



