it.i MODERN SCIENCE 341 



know the painter's style: do we foresee what will appear 

 on the canvas? We possess the elements of the problem; 

 we know in an abstract way, how it will be solved, for the 

 portrait will surely resemble the model and will surely 

 resemble also the artist; but the concrete solution brings 

 with it that unforeseeable nothing which is everything 

 in a work of art. And it is this nothing that takes time. 

 Nought as matter, it creates itself as form. The sprouting 

 and flowering of this form are stretched out on an un- 

 shrinkable duration, which is one with their essence. So 

 of the works of nature. Their novelty arises from an inter- 

 nal impetus which is progress or succession, which confers 

 on succession a peculiar virtue or which owes to succes- 

 sion the whole of its virtue — which, at any rate, makes 

 succession, or continuity of interpenetration in time, irre- 

 ducible to a mere instantaneous juxtaposition in space. 

 This is why the idea of reading in a present state of the 

 material universe the future of living forms, and of unfold- 

 ing now their history yet to come, involves a veritable 

 absurdity. But this absurdity is difficult to bring out, 

 because our memory is accustomed to place alongside of 

 each other, in an ideal space, the terms it perceives in turn, 

 because it always represents past succession in the form of 

 juxtaposition. It is able to do so, indeed, just because the 

 past belongs to that which is already invented, to the dead, 

 and no longer to creation and to life. Then, as the succes- 

 sion to come will end by being a succession past, we per- 

 suade ourselves that the duration to come admits of the 

 same treatment as past duration, that it is, even now, un- 

 reliable, that the future is there, rolled up, already painted 

 on the canvas. An illusion, no doubt, but an illusion that 

 is natural, ineradicable, and that will last as long as the 

 human mind! 



Time is invention or it is nothing at all. But of time- 



