4 CREATIVE EVOLUTION ichap. 



psychic states. As a matter of fact, this substratum has 

 no reality; it is merely a symbol intended to recall un- 

 ceasingly 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 perceive 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 any- 

 thing but the present — no prolonging of the past into the 

 actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration 

 is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into 

 the future and which swells as it advances. And as the 

 past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to 

 its preservation. Memory, as we have tried to prove," 

 is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, 

 or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, 

 no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, 



1 Matiere et memoire, Paris, 1896, chaps, ii. and iii. 



