ij DURATION 3 



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 at- 

 tention, 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. Discontinuous though they appear, however, 

 in point of fact they stand out against the continuity of a 

 background 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 com- 

 prises 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 

 ego, indifferent and unchangeable, on which it threads 

 the psychic states which it has set up as independent 

 entities. Instead of a flux of fleeting shades merging 

 into each other, it perceives distinct and, so to speak, 

 solid colors, 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 colorless sub- 

 stratum is perpetually colored by that which covers it, 

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

 since we only perceive what is colored, or, in other words, 



