Time and Free Will

The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.

Perhaps the difficulty of the problem lies chiefly in the fact that we call by the same name, and picture to ourselves in the same way, intensities which are very different in nature

But, in the immense majority of cases, we decide about the intensity of the effect without even knowing the nature of the cause, much less its magnitude : indeed, it is the very intensity of the effect which often leads us to venture an hypothesis as to the number and nature of the causes, and thus to revise the judgment of our senses, which at first represented them as insignificant.

But how can a more intense sensation contain one of less intensity ? Shall we say that the first implies the second, that we reach the sensation of higher intensity only on condition of having first passed through the less intense stages of the same sensation, and that in a certain sense we are concerned, here also, with the relation of container to contained ?

“ If a man were to inquire of Nature the reason of her creative activity, and if she were willing to give ear and answer, she would say—‘ Ask me not, but understand in silence, even as I am silent and am not wont to speak.’ ”

the whole of Professor Bergson’s philosophy centres round his conception of real concrete duration and the specific feeling of duration which our consciousness has when it does away with convention and habit and gets back to its natural attitude.