"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." The more we study Time, the more we may grasp this vision ourselves, and then we shall comprehend that la duree implies invention, the creation of new forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new--in short, an evolution which is creative. CHAPTER VII FREEDOM OF THE WILL Spirit of man revolts from physical and psychological determinism--Former examined and rejected--The latter more subtle--Vice of "associationism"--Psychology without a self. Condemnation of psychological determinism--Room for freedom--The self in action--Astronomical forecasts--Foreseeableness of any human action impossible--Human wills centres of indetermination--Not all our acts free--True freedom, self-determination.