"there is
nothing in it." Yet I know the room is full of air; but, as we do not
sit on air, the room truly contains nothing that at this moment, for the
visitor and for myself, counts for anything. In a general way, human
work consists in creating utility; and, as long as the work is not
done, there is "nothing"--nothing that we want. Our life is thus spent
in filling voids, which our intellect conceives under the influence, by
no means intellectual, of desire and of regret, under the pressure of
vital necessities; and if we mean by void an absence of utility and not
of things, we may say, in this quite relative sense, that we are
constantly going from the void to the full: such is the direction which
our action takes. Our speculation cannot help doing the same; and,
naturally, it passes from the relative sense to the absolute sense,
since it is exercised on things themselves and not on the utility they
have for us. Thus is implanted in us the idea that reality fills a void,
and that Nothing, conceived as an absence of everything, pre-exists
before all things in right, if not in fact. It is this illusion that we
have tried to remove by showing that the idea of Nothing, if we try to
see in it that of an annihilation of all things, is self-destructive and
reduced to a mere word; and that if, on the contrary, it is truly an
idea, then we find in it as much matter as in the idea of All.

* * * * *

This long analysis has been necessary to show that _a self-sufficient
reality is not necessarily a reality foreign to duration_. If we pass
(consciously or unconsciously) through the idea of the nought in order
to reach that of being, the being to which we come is a logical or
mathematical essence, therefore non-temporal. And, consequently, a
static conception of the real is forced on us: everything appears given
once for all, in eternity. But we must accustom ourselves to think being
directly, without making a detour, without first appealing to the
phantom of the nought which interposes itself between it and us. We must
strive to see in order to see, and no longer to see in order to act.
Then the Absolute is revealed very near us and, in a certain measure,
in us. It is of psychological and not of mathematical nor logical
essence. It lives with us. Like us, but in certain aspects infinitely
more concentrated and more gathered up in itself, it _endures_.

But do we ever think true duration? Here ag