154 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



states have only intensity, and that only extensive objects can be 

 measured. 



Having shown that quantitative differences are never applicable to 

 psychic states, but only to magnitudes ultimately spatial in character, 

 the author turns to the idea of duration. In this chapter he shows 

 that superficial psychic states are invested with the discontinuity of 

 their external, or spatial, causes, but that the true psychic states lie 

 deeper down, that they interpenetrate, and form an organic whole. 

 This is the real soul, and it is the freedom of this soul that must solve 

 the free-will problem. 



There are two kinds of multiplicity: that of material objects con- 

 ceived as discontinuous, and countable in space, and that of psychic 

 states not countable until conceived of metaphorically as occupying 

 positions in space. 



We may speak of homogeneous time, and speak of conscious states 

 as a discrete series occupying this time, but in reality this time is not 

 time at all but a spatial metaphor for time : whenever we speak thus 

 of time, we use images borrowed from space. 



Probably man only conceives of space as an empty homogeneous 

 medium. It is doubtful whether animals perceive the external world 

 quite as we do : animals have been seen to return in a straight line to 

 their old home, pursuing a path hitherto unknown to them, over a 

 distance which may amount to several hundred miles. Directions may 

 be known to animals as shades of feeling, like our own discrimination of 

 right and left. The reality known as sensible qualities is heterogene- 

 ous, while that of quantities is homogeneous. Counting, mathematics, 

 abstract thought, and perhaps language, depend on this latter. 



"Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious 

 states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from sepa- 

 rating its present state from its former states." It must then form 

 past and present into an organic whole, as when we recall the notes of 

 a tune melting, so to speak, into one another. Each one of these notes 

 represents the musical phrase. 



Pure duration is wholly qualitative ; it cannot be measured unless 

 it is represented symbolically in space. 



