en I write these lines a clock near me is striking the
hour; but my distracted ear is only aware of it after several strokes
have already sounded; that is, I have not counted them. And yet an
effort of introspective attention enables me to total the four strokes
already struck and add them to those which I hear. If I then withdraw
into myself and carefully question myself about what has just happened,
I become aware that the first four sounds had struck my ear and even
moved my consciousness, but that the sensations produced by each of
them, instead of following in juxtaposition, had blended into one
another in such a way as to endow the whole with a peculiar aspect and
make of it a kind of musical phrase. In order to estimate in retrospect
the number of strokes which have sounded, I attempted to reconstitute
this phrase in thought: my imagination struck one, then two, then three,
and so long as it had not reached the exact number four, my sensibility,
on being questioned, replied that the total effect differed in quality.
It had therefore noted the succession of the four strokes in a way of
its own, but quite otherwise than by addition, and without bringing in
the image of a juxtaposition of distinct terms. In fact, the number of
strokes struck was perceived as quality, not as quantity: duration is
thus presented to immediate consciousness, and preserves this form so
long as it does not give place to a symbolical representation drawn from
space." ("Essay on the Immediate Data", pages 95-96.)

And now are we to believe that return to the feeling of real duration
consists in letting ourselves go, and allowing ourselves an idle
relaxation in dream or dissolution in sensation, "as a shepherd
dozing watches the water flow"? Or are we even to believe, as has been
maintained, that the intuition of duration reduces "to the spasm of
delight of the mollusc basking in the sun"? This is a complete mistake!
We should fall back into the misconceptions which I was pointing out in
connection with immediacy in general; we should be forgetting that
there are several rhythms of duration, as there are several kinds of
consciousness; and finally, we should be misunderstanding the character
of a creative invention perpetually renewed, which is that of our inner
life.

For it is in duration that we are free, not in spatialised time, as all
determinist conceptions suppose in contradiction.

I shall not go back to the proofs of this thesis;