Finally, Bergson reminds us that if our existence were composed 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. La duree, however, is the foundation of our being and is, as we feel, the very substance of the world in which we live. Associating his view of Real Time with the reality of change, he points out that nothing is more resistant or more substantial than la duree, for our duree 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 growth of personality, and no evolution of the universe. La duree is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances, leaving on all things its bite, or the mark of its tooth. This being so, consciousness cannot go through the same state twice; history does never really repeat itself. Our personality is being built up each instant with its accumulated experience; it shoots, grows, and ripens without ceasing. We are reminded of George Eliot's lines:
"Our past still travels with us from afar And what we have been makes us what we are."
For our consciousness this is what we mean by the term "exist." "For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, and to go on creating oneself endlessly." [Footnote: Creative Evolution, p. 8 (Fr. p. 8).] Real Time has, then, a very vital meaning for us as conscious beings, indeed for all that lives, for the organism which lives is a thing that "endures." "Wherever anything lives," says Bergson, "there is a register in which Time is being inscribed. This, it will be said, is only a metaphor. It is of the very essence of mechanism in fact, to consider as metaphorical every expression which attributes to Time an effective action and a reality of its own. In vain does immediate experience show us that the very basis of our conscious existence is Memory--that is to say, the prolongation of the past into the present, or in a word, duree, acting and irreversible." [Footnote: Creative Evolution, p. 17 (Fr. pp. 17-18).] Time is falsely assumed to have just as much reality for a living being as for an hour-glass. But if Time does nothing, it is nothing. It is, however, in Bergson's view, vital to the whole of the universe. He expressly denies that la duree is merely subjective; the universe "endures" as a whole. In Time and Free Will it did not seem to matter whether we regarded our inner life as having duree or as actually being duree. In the first instance, if we have duree it is then only an aspect of reality, but if our personality itself is duree, then Time is reality itself. He develops this last point of view more explicitly in his later works, and la duree is identified not only with the reality of change, but with memory and with spirit. [Footnote: La Perception du Changement, Lecture 2.] In it he finds the substance of a universe whose reality is change. "God," said Plato, "being unable to make the world eternal, gave it Time--a moving image of reality." Bergson himself quotes this remark of Plato, and seems to have a vision like that of Rosetti's "Blessed Damozel," who ...... "saw Time like a pulse shake fierce Through all the worlds."