of separate states with an impassive ego to unite them,
for us there would be no duration. For an ego which does not change does
not _endure_, and a psychic state which remains the same so long as it
is not replaced by the following state does not _endure_ either. Vain,
therefore, is the attempt to range such states beside each other on the
ego supposed to sustain them: never can these solids strung upon a solid
make up that duration which flows. What we actually obtain in this way
is an artificial imitation of the internal life, a static equivalent
which will lend itself better to the requirements of logic and language,
just because we have eliminated from it the element of real time. But,
as regards the psychical life unfolding beneath the symbols which
conceal it, we readily perceive that time is just the stuff it is made
of.
There is, moreover, no stuff more resistant nor more substantial. For
our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were,
there would never be anything but the present--no prolonging of the past
into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the
continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which
swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also
there is no limit to its preservation. Memory, as we have tried to
prove,[3] is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or
of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer; there
is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works
intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of the
past upon the past goes on without relaxation. In reality, the past is
preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it
follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed
from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is
about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that
would fain leave it outside. The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so
as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and
to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the
present situation or further the action now being prepared--in short,
only that which can give _useful_ work. At the most, a few superfluous
recollections may succeed in smuggling themselves through the half-open
door. These memories, messengers from the unconscious, remind us of what
we
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