iv.] MODERN SCIENCE 339 



physicist is the number of units of duration the process 

 fills; he does not concern himself about the units themselves 

 and that is why the successive states of the world might 

 be spread out all at once in space without his having to 

 change anything in his science or to cease talking about 

 time. But for us, conscious beings, it is the units that 

 matter, for we do not count extremities of intervals, we 

 feel and live the intervals themselves. Now, we are con- 

 scious of these intervals as of definite intervals. Let me 

 come back again to the sugar in my glass of water: 1 why 

 must I wait for it to melt? While the duration of the 

 phenomenon is relative for the physicist, since it is reduced 

 to a certain number of units of time and the units them- 

 selves are indifferent, this duration is an absolute for my 

 consciousness, for it coincides with a certain degree of 

 impatience which is rigorously determined. Whence 

 comes this determination? What is it that obliges me to 

 wait, and to wait for a certain length of psychical duration 

 which is forced upon me, over which I have no power? 

 If succession, in so far as distinct from mere juxtaposition, 

 has no real efficacy, if time is not a kind of force, why does 

 the universe unfold its successive states with a velocity 

 which, in regard to my consciousness, is a veritable abso- 

 lute? Why with this particular velocity rather than any 

 other? Why not with an infinite velocity? Why, in other 

 words, is not everything given at once, as on the film of the 

 cinematograph? The more I consider this point, the more 

 it seems to me that, if the future is bound to succeed the 

 present instead of being given alongside of it, it is because 

 the future is not altogether determined at the present 

 moment, and that if the time taken up by this succession 

 is something other than a number, if it has for the con- 

 sciousness that is installed in it absolute value and reality, 

 1 See page 10. 



