anvas? We possess the
elements of the problem; we know in an abstract way, how it will be
solved, for the portrait will surely resemble the model and will surely
resemble also the artist; but the concrete solution brings with it that
unforeseeable nothing which is everything in a work of art. And it is
this nothing that takes time. Nought as matter, it creates itself as
form. The sprouting and flowering of this form are stretched out on an
unshrinkable duration, which is one with their essence. So of the works
of nature. Their novelty arises from an internal impetus which is
progress or succession, which confers on succession a peculiar virtue or
which owes to succession the whole of its virtue--which, at any rate,
makes succession, or _continuity of interpenetration_ in time,
irreducible to a mere instantaneous juxtaposition in space. This is why
the idea of reading in a present state of the material universe the
future of living forms, and of unfolding now their history yet to come,
involves a veritable absurdity. But this absurdity is difficult to bring
out, because our memory is accustomed to place alongside of each other,
in an ideal space, the terms it perceives in turn, because it always
represents _past_ succession in the form of juxtaposition. It is able to
do so, indeed, just because the past belongs to that which is already
invented, to the dead, and no longer to creation and to life. Then, as
the succession to come will end by being a succession past, we persuade
ourselves that the duration to come admits of the same treatment as past
duration, that it is, even now, unrollable, that the future is there,
rolled up, already painted on the canvas. An illusion, no doubt, but an
illusion that is natural, ineradicable, and that will last as long as
the human mind!

_Time is invention or it is nothing at all._ But of time-invention
physics can take no account, restricted as it is to the
cinematographical method. It is limited to counting simultaneities
between the events that make up this time and the positions of the
mobile T on its trajectory. It detaches these events from the whole,
which at every moment puts on a new form and which communicates to them
something of its novelty. It considers them in the abstract, such as
they would be outside of the living whole, that is to say, in a time
unrolled in space. It retains only the events or systems of events that
can be thus isolated without being made to undergo to