xmcamail.1999_12: Bergson on duration

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Bergson on duration

"It is true that we count successive moments of duration, and that, because
of its relations with number, time at first seems to us to be a measurable
magnitude, just like space. But there is here an important distinction to
be made. I say, e.g., that a minute has just elapsed, and I mean by this
that a pendulum, beating the seconds, has completed sixty oscillations. If
I picture these sixty oscillations to myself all at once by a single mental
perception, I exclude by hypothesis the idea of succession. I don not think
of sixty strokes which succeed one another, but of sixty points on a fixed
line, each one of which symbolizes, so to speak, an oscillation of the
pendulum. If, on the other hand, I wish to picture these sixty oscillations
in succession, but without altering the way they are produced in space, I
shall be compelled to think of each oscillation to the exclusion of the
recollection of the preceding one, for space has preserved no trace of it;
but by doing so I shall condem myself to remain for ever in the present; I
shall give up the attempt to think a succession or a duration. No if,
finally, I retain the recollection of the preceding oscialation together
with the image of the present oscillation, one of two things will happen.
Either I shall set the two images side by side, and we fall back on our
first hypothesis, or I shall perceive one in the other, each permeating the
other and organizing them like the notes of a tine, so as to form what we
shall call a continuous or qualitative multiplicity with no resemblance to
number. I shall this get the image of a pure duration; but I shall have
entirely got rid of the idea of a homogeneous medium or a measurable
quantity."