the world unfolded like a
fan, so to speak, and the divisions T_{1}, T_{2}, T_{3}, ... of the line
which will be called, by definition, "the course of time." In the eyes of
science nothing will have changed. But if, time thus spreading itself
out in space and succession becoming juxtaposition, science has nothing
to change in what it tells us, we must conclude that, in what it tells
us, it takes account neither of _succession_ in what of it is specific
nor of _time_ in what there is in it that is fluent. It has no sign to
express what strikes our consciousness in succession and duration. It no
more applies to becoming, so far as that is moving, than the bridges
thrown here and there across the stream follow the water that flows
under their arches.

Yet succession exists; I am conscious of it; it is a fact. When a
physical process is going on before my eyes, my perception and my
inclination have nothing to do with accelerating or retarding it. What
is important to the physicist is the _number_ of units of duration the
process fills; he does not concern himself about the units themselves
and that is why the successive states of the world might be spread out
all at once in space without his having to change anything in his
science or to cease talking about time. But for us, conscious beings, it
is the units that matter, for we do not count extremities of intervals,
we feel and live the intervals themselves. Now, we are conscious of
these intervals as of _definite_ intervals. Let me come back again to
the sugar in my glass of water:[106] why must I wait for it to melt?
While the duration of the phenomenon is _relative_ for the physicist,
since it is reduced to a certain number of units of time and the units
themselves are indifferent, this duration is an _absolute_ for my
consciousness, for it coincides with a certain degree of impatience
which is rigorously determined. Whence comes this determination? What is
it that obliges me to wait, and to wait for a certain length of
psychical duration which is forced upon me, over which I have no power?
If succession, in so far as distinct from mere juxtaposition, has no
real efficacy, if time is not a kind of force, why does the universe
unfold its successive states with a velocity which, in regard to my
consciousness, is a veritable absolute? Why with this particular
velocity rather than any other? Why not with an infinite velocity? Why,
in other words, is not everything given at o