1.1 INDIVIDUALITY AND AGE 17 



immediate experience show us that the very basis of our 

 conscious existence is memory, that is to say, the pro- 

 longation of the past into the present, or, in a word, dura- 

 tion, acting and irreversible. In vain does reason prove 

 to us that the more we get away from the objects cut out 

 and the systems isolated by common sense and by science 

 and the deeper we dig beneath them, the more we have 

 to do with a reality which changes as a whole in its in- 

 most states, as if an accumulative memory of the past 

 made it impossible to go back again. The mechanistic 

 instinct of the mind is stronger than reason, stronger than 

 immediate experience. The metaphysician that we each 

 carry unconsciously within us, and the presence of which 

 is explained, as we shall see later on, by the very place that 

 man occupies amongst the living beings, has its fixed re- 

 quirements, its ready-made explanations, its irreducible 

 propositions: all unite in denying concrete duration. 

 Change must be reducible to an arrangement or rearrange- 

 ment of parts; the irreversibility of time must be an ap- 

 pearance relative to our ignorance; the impossibility of 

 turning back must be only the inability of man to put 

 things in place again. So growing old can be nothing more 

 than the gradual gain or loss of certain substances, per- 

 haps both together. Time is assumed to have just as 

 much reality for a living being as for an hour-glass, in 

 which the top part empties while the lower fills, and all goes 

 where it was before when you turn the glass upside down. 

 True, biologists are not agreed on what is gained and 

 what is lost between the day of birth and the day of death. 

 There are those who hold to the continual growth in the 

 volume of protoplasm from the birth of the cell right on 

 to its death. 1 More probable and more profound is the 



1 Sedgwick Minot, On Certain Phenomena of Growing Old (Proc. Amer. 

 Assoc, for the Advancement of Science, 39th Meeting, Salem, 1891, pp. 

 271-288). 



