342 CREATIVE EVOLUTION iohap. 



invention physics can take no account, restricted as it is 

 to the cinematographical method. It is limited to count- 

 ing simultaneities between the events that make up this 

 time and the positions of the mobile T on its trajectory. 

 It detaches these events from the whole, which at every 

 moment puts on a new form and which communicates to 

 them something of its novelty. It considers them in the 

 abstract, such as they would be outside of the living whole, 

 that is to say, in a time unrolled in space. It retains only 

 the events or systems of events that can be thus isolated 

 without being made to undergo too profound a deformation, 

 because only these lend themselves to the application of 

 its method. Our physics dates from the day when it was 

 known how to isolate such systems. To sum up, while 

 modern physics is distinguished from ancient physics by the 

 fact that it considers any moment of time whatever, it rests 

 altogether on a substitution of time-length for time-invention. 

 It seems then that, parallel to this physics, a second 

 kind of knowledge ought to have grown up, which could 

 have retained what physics allowed to escape. On the 

 flux itself of duration science neither would nor could lay 

 hold, bound as it was to the cinematographical method. 

 This second kind of knowledge would have set the cinemato- 

 graphical method aside. It would have called upon the 

 mind to renounce its most cherished habits. It is within 

 becoming that it would have transported us by an effort of 

 sympathy. We should no longer be asking where a mov- 

 ing body will be, what shape a system will take, through 

 what state a change will pass at a given moment : the mo- 

 ments of time, which are only arrests of our attention, 

 would no longer exist; it is the flow of time, it is the very 

 flux of the real that we should be trying to follow. The 

 first kind of knowledge has the advantage of enabling us to 

 foresee the future and of making us in some measure masters 



