gh to be
negligible, or because it intends to take them into account later on. It
is none the less true that these influences are so many threads which
bind up the system to another more extensive, and to this a third which
includes both, and so on to the system most objectively isolated and
most independent of all, the solar system complete. But, even here, the
isolation is not absolute. Our sun radiates heat and light beyond the
farthest planet. And, on the other hand, it moves in a certain fixed
direction, drawing with it the planets and their satellites. The thread
attaching it to the rest of the universe is doubtless very tenuous.
Nevertheless it is along this thread that is transmitted down to the
smallest particle of the world in which we live the duration immanent to
the whole of the universe.

The universe _endures_. The more we study the nature of time, the more
we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of
forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new. The systems
marked off by science _endure_ only because they are bound up
inseparably with the rest of the universe. It is true that in the
universe itself two opposite movements are to be distinguished, as we
shall see later on, "descent" and "ascent." The first only unwinds a
roll ready prepared. In principle, it might be accomplished almost
instantaneously, like releasing a spring. But the ascending movement,
which corresponds to an inner work of ripening or creating, _endures_
essentially, and imposes its rhythm on the first, which is inseparable
from it.

There is no reason, therefore, why a duration, and so a form of
existence like our own, should not be attributed to the systems that
science isolates, provided such systems are reintegrated into the Whole.
But they must be so reintegrated. The same is even more obviously true
of the objects cut out by our perception. The distinct outlines which we
see in an object, and which give it its individuality, are only the
design of a certain kind of _influence_ that we might exert on a certain
point of space: it is the plan of our eventual actions that is sent back
to our eyes, as though by a mirror, when we see the surfaces and edges
of things. Suppress this action, and with it consequently those main
directions which by perception are traced out for it in the entanglement
of the real, and the individuality of the body is reabsorbed in the
universal interaction which, without doub