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A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson by Edouard Louis Emmanuel Julien Le Roy
page 60 of 162 (37%)
must shake off familiar representations! Common-sense cannot think in
terms of movement. It forges a static conception of it, and destroys it by
arresting it under pretext of seeing it better. To define movement as a
series of positions, with a generating law, with a time-table or
correspondence sheet between places and times, is surely a ready-made
presentation. Are we not confusing the trajectory and its performance, the
points traversed and the traversing of the points, the result of the
genesis of the result; in short, the quantitative distance over which the
flight extends, and the qualitative flight which puts this distance behind
it? In this way the very mobility which is the essence of movement
vanishes. There is the same common mistake about time. Analytic and
synthetic thought can see in time only a string of coincidences, each of
them instantaneous, a logical series of relations. It imagines the whole
of it to be a graduated slide-rule, in which the luminous point called the
present is the geometrical index.

Thus it gives form to time in space, "a kind of fourth dimension," ("Essay
on the Immediate Data".) or at least it reduces it to nothing more than an
abstract scheme of succession, "a stream without bottom or sides, flowing
without determinable strength, in an indefinable direction."
("Introduction to Metaphysics".) It requires time to be homogeneous, and
every homogeneous medium is space, "for as homogeneity consists here in the
absence of any quality, it is not clear how two forms of homogeneity could
be distinguished one from the other." ("Essay on the Immediate Data", page
74.)

Quite different appears real duration, the duration which is lived. It is
pure heterogeneity. It contains a thousand different degrees of tension or
relaxation, and its rhythm varies without end. The magic silence of calm
nights or the wild disorder of a tempest, the still joy of ecstasy or the
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