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 tumult of passion unchained, a steep climb towards
a difficult truth or a gentle descent from a luminous principle to
consequences which easily follow, a moral crisis or a shooting pain,
call up intuitions admitting no comparison with one another. We have
here no series of moments, but prolonged and interpenetrating phases;
their sequence is not a substitution of one point for another, but
rather resembles a musical resolution of harmony into harmony. And
of this ever-new melody which constitutes our inner life every moment
contains a resonance or an echo of past moments. "What are we really,
what is our character, except the condensation of the history which we
have lived since our birth, even before our birth, since we bring with
us our prenatal dispositions? Without doubt we think only with a small
part of our past; but it is with our complete past, including our
original bias of soul, that we desire, wish, and act." ("Creative
Evolution", pages 5-6.) This is what makes our duration irreversible,
and its novelty perpetual, for each of the states through which it
passes envelops the recollection of all past states. And thus we see,
in the end, how, for a being endowed with memory, "existence consists
in change, change in ripening, ripening in endless self-creation."
("Creative Evolution", page 8.)

With this formula we face the capital problem in which psychology and
metaphysics meet, that of liberty. The solution given by Mr Bergson
marks one of the culminating points of his philosophy. It is from this
summit that he finds light thrown on the riddle of inner being. And it
is the centre where all the lines of his research converge.

What is liberty? What must we understand by this word? Beware of the
answer you are going to give. Every definition, in the strict sense of
the term, will imply the determinist thesis in advance, since, under
pain of going round in a circle, it will be bound to express liberty
as a function of what it is not