LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 117 



which instructs him for the action he prepares. 

 The more successive events he seizes in this 

 single glance, the better he succeeds in domin- 

 ating them. Now, if we consider consciousness 

 confronted with matter, we find that it is charac- 

 terised by just this fact, that in an interval which 

 for it is infinitely short, and which constitutes one 

 of our " instants," it seizes under an indivisible 

 form millions and billions of events that succeed 

 each other in inert matter. Yes, that indivisible 

 sensation of light which I have at this moment, if 

 I open my eyes for a single instant, is the con- 

 densation of an immensely long history unrolling 

 itself in the world of matter : there are, in that 

 single instant, billions of successive vibrations 

 that is to say, a series of events such that, if I 

 wished to count them even with the utmost 

 rapidity, it would require thousands and thou- 

 sands of years for the enumeration. It is this 

 immense history that I seize all at once under the 

 pictorial form of a very brief sensation of light. 

 And we could say just the same of all our other 

 sensations. Sensation, which is the point at 

 which consciousness touches matter, is, then, the 

 condensation, in the duration peculiar to this con- 

 sciousness, of a history which in itself, in the 

 world of matter, is something infinitely diluted, 

 and which occupies enormous periods of what 

 might be called the duration of things. So, 

 looked at from the side of sensation, conscious- 

 ness gives us the same impression as it did just 



