i.j UNORGANIZED BODIES 9 



selves to pointing out that the abstract time t attributed 

 by science to a material object or to an isolated system 

 consists only in a certain number of simultaneities or more 

 generally of correspondences, and that this number re- 

 mains the same, whatever be the nature of the intervals 

 between the correspondences. With these intervals we 

 are never concerned when dealing with inert matter; or, 

 if they are considered, it is in order to count therein fresh 

 correspondences, between which again we shall not care 

 what happens. Common sense, which is occupied with 

 detached objects, and also science, which considers isolated 

 systems, are concerned only with the ends of the intervals 

 and not with the intervals themselves. Therefore the flow 

 of time might assume an infinite rapidity, the entire past, 

 present, and future of material objects or of isolated 

 systems might be spread out all at once in space, without 

 there being anything to change either in the formulae 

 of the scientist or even in the language of common sense. 

 The number t would always stand for the same thing; it 

 would still count the same number of correspondences 

 between the states of the objects or systems and the points 

 of the line, ready drawn, which would be then the " course 

 of time. " 



Yet succession is an undeniable fact, even in the material 

 world. Though our reasoning on isolated systems may 

 imply that their history, past, present, and future, might 

 be instantaneously unfurled like a fan, this history, in 

 point of fact, unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied 

 a duration like our own. If I want to mix a glass of sugar 

 and water, I must, willy nilly, wait until the sugar melts. 

 This little fact is big with meaning. . For here the time I 

 have to wait is not that mathematical time which would 

 apply equally well to the entire history of the material 

 world, even if that history were spread out instantaneously 



