science and metaphysics are two opposed although
complementary ways of knowing, the first retaining only moments, that is
to say, that which does not endure, the second bearing on duration
itself. Now, it was natural to hesitate between so novel a conception
of metaphysics and the traditional conception. The temptation must have
been strong to repeat with the new science what had been tried on the
old, to suppose our scientific knowledge of nature completed at once, to
unify it entirely, and to give to this unification, as the Greeks had
already done, the name of metaphysics. So, beside the new way that
philosophy might have prepared, the old remained open, that indeed which
physics trod. And, as physics retained of time only what could as well
be spread out all at once in space, the metaphysics that chose the same
direction had necessarily to proceed as if time created and annihilated
nothing, as if duration had no efficacy. Bound, like the physics of the
moderns and the metaphysics of the ancients, to the cinematographical
method, it ended with the conclusion, implicitly admitted at the start
and immanent in the method itself: _All is given._

That metaphysics hesitated at first between the two paths seems to us
unquestionable. The indecision is visible in Cartesianism. On the one
hand, Descartes affirms universal mechanism: from this point of view
movement would be relative,[107] and, as time has just as much reality
as movement, it would follow that past, present and future are given
from all eternity. But, on the other hand (and that is why the
philosopher has not gone to these extreme consequences), Descartes
believes in the free will of man. He superposes on the determinism of
physical phenomena the indeterminism of human actions, and,
consequently, on time-length a time in which there is invention,
creation, true succession. This duration he supports on a God who is
unceasingly renewing the creative act, and who, being thus tangent to
time and becoming, sustains them, communicates to them necessarily
something of his absolute reality. When he places himself at this
second point of view, Descartes speaks of movement, even spatial, as of
an absolute.[108]

He therefore entered both roads one after the other, having resolved to
follow neither of them to the end. The first would have led him to the
denial of free will in man and of real will in God. It was the
suppression of all efficient duration, the likening of