338 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



spondences of this kind. We have therefore counted 

 simultaneities; we have not concerned ourselves with the 

 flux that goes from one to another. The proof of this is 

 that I can, at discretion, vary the rapidity of the flux of 

 the universe in regard to a consciousness that is independent 

 of it and that would perceive the variation by the quite 

 qualitative feeling that it would have of it : whatever the 

 variation had been, since the movement of T would partici- 

 pate in this variation, I should have nothing to change in 

 my equations nor in the numbers that figure in them. 



Let us go further. Suppose that the rapidity of the 

 flux becomes infinite. Imagine, as we said in the first pages 

 of this book, that the trajectory of the mobile T is given 

 at once, and that the whole history, past, present and future, 

 of the material universe is spread out instantaneously 

 in space. The same mathematical correspondences will 

 subsist between the moments of the history of the world 

 unfolded like a fan, so to speak, and the divisions Tj, T 2 , T 3 , 

 ... of the line which will be called, by definition, "the 

 course of time." In the eyes of science nothing will have 

 changed. But if, time thus spreading itself out in space 

 and succession becoming juxtaposition, science has noth- 

 ing to change in what it tells us, we must conclude that, 

 in what it tells us, it takes account neither of succession 

 in what of it is specific nor of time in what there is in it that 

 is fluent. It has no sign to express what strikes our con- 

 sciousness in succession and duration. It no more applies 

 to becoming, so far as that is moving, than the bridges 

 thrown here and there across the stream follow the water 

 that flows under their arches. 



Yet succession exists; I am conscious of it; it is a fact. 

 When a physical process is going on before my eyes, my 

 perception and my inclination have nothing to do with 

 accelerating or retarding it. What is important to the 



