4 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP 



merging into each other, it perceives distinct and, 

 so to speak, solid colours, set side by side like 

 the beads of a necklace ; it must perforce then 

 suppose a thread, also itself solid, to hold the beads 

 together. But if this colourless substratum is per 

 petually coloured by that which covers it, it is for 

 us, in its indeterminateness, as if it did not exist, 

 since we only perceive what is coloured, or, in other 

 words, psychic states. As a matter of fact, this sub 

 stratum has no reality ; it is merely a symbol intended 

 to recall unceasingly to our consciousness the artificial 

 character of the process by which the attention places 

 clean-cut states side by side, where actually there 

 is a continuity which unfolds. If our existence were 

 composed of separate states with an impassive ego 

 to unite them, for us there would be no duration. 

 For an ego which does not change does not endure^ 

 and a psychic state which remains the same so long 

 as it is not replaced by the following state does not 

 endure either. Vain, therefore, is the attempt to range 

 such states beside each other on the ego supposed to 

 sustain them : never can these solids strung upon a solid 

 make up that duration which flows. What we actually 

 obtain in this way is an artificial imitation of the 

 internal life, a static equivalent which will lend itself 

 better to the requirements of logic and language, just 

 because we have eliminated from it the element of 

 real time. But, as regards the psychical life unfolding 

 beneath the symbols which conceal it, we readily per 

 ceive that time is just the stuff it is made of. 



There is, moreover, no stuff more resistant nor 

 more substantial. For our duration is not merely one 

 instant replacing another ; if it were, there would never 

 be anything but the present no prolonging of the 



