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, and a psychic state which remains the same so long as it is not replaced by the following state does not endure either. Vain, therefore, is the attempt to range such states beside each other on the ego supposed to sustain them: never can there solids strung upon a solid make up duration that flows. What we actually obtain in this way is an artificial imitation on the internal life, a static equivalent which will lend itself better to the requirements of logic and language, just because we have eliminated from it the element of real time.
But, as regards the physcical life unfolding beneath the symbols that conceal it, we readily perceive that
time is just the stuff it is made of.
Our personality, which is being built up each instant with its accumulated experience, changes without ceasing. By changing, it prevents any state, although superficially identical with another, from ever repeating it in its very depth. That is why our duration is irreversible. We could not live over again a single moment, for we should have to begin by effacing the memory of all that had followed. Even could we erase this memory from our intellect, we could not from our will.
The finished portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the nature of the artist, by the colors spread out of the palette; but, even with the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not even the artist, could have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict it would be to produce it before it was produced - an absurd hypothesis which is its own refutation. Even so with regards to the moments of our life, of which was are artisans. Each of them is a kind of creation. And just as the talent of the painter is formed or deformed - in any case, is modified - under the very influence of the works he produces, so each of our states, at the moment of its issue, modifies our personality, being indeed the new form that we are assuming. It is right then to say that what we do depends on what we are; but it is necessary to add also that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and that we are creating ourselves continually. This creation of self by self is the more complete, the more one reasons what one does.
For reason does not proceed in such matters as in geometry, where impersonal premisses are given once for all, and an impersonal conclusion must by perforce be drawn. Here, on the contrary, the same reasons may dictate to different persons, or to the same person at different moments, acts profoundly different, although equally reasonable. The truth is that they are not quite the same reasons, since they are not those of the same person, nor of the same moment. That is why we cannot deal with them in the abstract, from the outside, as in geometry, nor solve for another the problems by which he is faced in life. Each must solve them from within, on his own account. But we need not go more deeply into this. We are seeking only the precise meaning that our consciousness gives to the word "exist", and we find that, for a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
