CONTINUITY OF BERGSON S THOUGHT 155 



In duration, each increase of stimulation is added to, and taken 

 up in, the preceding stimulations, while in things spatial, each state 

 perishes absolutely as the next arises. Time indeed seems to be 

 measurable by clocks, etc., but if all the measurers went faster at once, 

 the fraud would be discovered only by the soul and its duration. Within 

 there is succession without any mutual externality; outside is mutual 

 externality without succession. The present tick of the clock is radi- 

 cally distinct from the last, which is dead and non-existent except to 

 memory. 



There is a real space without duration and there is a real duration 

 without space. The meeting of these two gives a symbolical repre- 

 sentation of duration in terms of space. 



The famous paradox of the Eleatics arises from the confusion of 

 the trajectory in space, and the movement, whose basis is psychic and 

 indivisible. To cut the movement would be like cutting an elastic 

 string. Science eliminates duration from time and mobility from 

 motion, in order to deal with them for its purpose. But science does 

 not explain life. Science tells what is true at the beginning and end 

 of an interval, but we endure through that interval, and motion endures 

 as we do. If all the intervals in the world were shortened a thousand 

 times, but at the same rate, science would never know the difference. 



Our superficial states of mind are so intimately related to objects 

 in space that we regard them as having the numerical and measurable 

 properties of those objects; but below the self with well-defined states, 

 we feel the deeper self, in which succession means a melting together, 

 an organic oneness. 



Language cannot describe the deeper self without arresting its 

 mobility. Living in a town, we associate our mental states with 

 houses, streets, etc. But the self goes on and changes, while language 

 returns the same phrase for our experience, so that words are like dead 

 leaves floating on a dark and deep pool of psychic life. 



Language and analysis distort real feeling. A poem is conceived 

 as a living idea — it has to die to become expressed in words ; but these 

 may stir up life in other minds. 



On the surface, our ideas obey tlie law of association, but deeper down 



