iv MODERN SCIENCE 361 



duration, that it is, even now, unreliable, 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 nothing at all. But of time- 

 invention physics can take no account, restricted as 

 it is to the cinematographical method. It is limited 

 to counting simultaneities between the events that 

 make up this 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 something 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 sum 

 ,up, while modern physics is dhtinvuishp.d frpm ancient^ 

 physics by the fact that it considers any moment of time 

 whatever, it rests altogether, on a substitution of time-length . 

 or time-iny.Mim^^ 



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 flux itself of duration science neither woulcT~ 

 nor could lay hold, bound as it Was to the cinemato 

 graphical method. This second kind of knowledge 

 would have set the cinematographical method aside^. .. ; Jt 

 would have called upon the mind to renounce its most 

 cherished habits. It is within becoming that it would 



