BERGSON S CONCEPTION OF DURATION 20I 



may be put several years or centuries of astronomical time. Real 

 duration remains outside the calculation, and could only be perceived 

 by a consciousness capable of living through these intervals. But 

 these units of time which make up living duration, and which are 

 useless to the scientist, are just what concerns psychology; for 

 psychology deals with the intervals and not with the extremities of the 

 interval. Consciousness does not perceive time as a sum of units of 

 duration — ^it has no way of measuring time, and no reason for measur- 

 ing it; but a feeling which lasted only one day would for it lack 

 richness of content. We give this feeling a certain name, and we 

 believe that we can diminish its duration by half, and even halve 

 the duration of all the rest of our history. It seems as though it would 

 be the same Ufe, reduced only to a smaller scale, but we forget that 

 states of consciousness are growing processes, and that we caimot 

 vary their duration without altering their nature. The orbit of a 

 planet might be perceived all at once or in a very short time, because 

 its position or results of movement are the only things of importance, 

 and not the duration of the intervals between the positions. But in 

 deahng with a feeling, we perceive no precise result, except its having 

 been felt, and to estimate this result it would be necessary to have 

 passed through all the phases of the feeling itself and to have taken up 

 the same duration. 



And does the very possibility of seeing an astronomical period in miniature 

 thus imply the impossibility of modifying a psychological series in the same way, 

 since it is only by taking this psychological series as an invariable basis that we 

 shall be able to make an astronomical period vary arbitrarily as regards the unit 

 of duration ?' 



When we ask whether a future action could have been predicted, 

 we identify the time of the exact sciences with real duration, which 

 cannot be shortened by an instant vdthout altering the nature of its 

 content. Doubtless this false identification is made easier by the 

 fact that in a great many cases we can deal practically with real 

 duration as with astronomical time. When we have to determine 

 future states of consciousness, we must view their antecedents as 



■ Time and Free Will, p. 197. 



