, DURATION 3 



change has become so considerable as to force itself 

 on our attention, to speak as if a new state were placed 

 alongside the previous one. Of this new state we 

 assume that it remains unvarying in its turn, and 

 so on endlessly. The apparent discontinuity of the 

 psychical life is then due to our attention being fixed 

 on it by a series of separate acts : actually there is 

 only a gentle slope ; but in following the broken 

 line of our acts of attention, we think we perceive 

 separate steps. True, our psychic life is full of the 

 unforeseen. A thousand incidents arise, which seem 

 to be cut off from those which precede them, and 

 to be disconnected from those which follow. Dis 

 continuous though they appear, however, in point of 

 fact they stand out against the continuity of a back 

 ground on which they are designed, and to which 

 indeed they owe the intervals that separate them ; 

 they are the beats of the drum which break forth here 

 and there in the symphony. Our attention fixes on 

 them because they interest it more, but each of them 

 is borne by the fluid mass of our whole psychical 

 existence. Each is only the best illuminated point of a 

 moving zone which comprises all that we feel or think 

 or will all, in short, that we are at any given moment. 

 It is this entire zone which in reality makes up our 

 state. Now, states thus defined cannot be regarded 

 as distinct elements. They continue each other in an 

 endless flow. 



But, as our attention has distinguished and separated 

 them artificially, it is obliged next to reunite them by 

 an artificial bond. It imagines, therefore, a formless 

 egOy indifferent and unchangeable, on which it threads 

 the psychic states which it has set up as inde 

 pendent entities. Instead of a flux of fleeting shades 



