Above all it enables us to objectify them, to throw them out into the current of social life.  But just for this very reason we are in danger of living our lives superficially and of covering up our real self.  We are generally content with what is but a shadow of the real self, projected into space.  Consciousness, goaded on by an insatiable desire to separate, substitutes the symbol for the reality or perceives the reality only through the symbol.  As the self thus refracted and thereby broken in pieces, is much better adapted to the requirements of social life in general, and of language in particular, consciousness prefers it and gradually loses sight of the fundamental self which is a qualitative multiplicity of conscious states flowing, interpenetrating, melting into one another, and forming an organic whole, a living unity or personality.  It is through a consideration of la duree and what it implies that Bergson is led on to the distinction of two selves in each of us.

Towards the close of his essay on Time and Free Will, he points out that there are finally two different selves, a fundamental self and a social self.  We reach the former by deep introspection which leads us to grasp our inner states as living things, constantly becoming, never amenable to measure, which permeate one another and of which the succession in la duree has nothing in common with side-by-sideness.  But the moments at which we thus grasp ourselves are rare; the greater part of our time we live outside ourselves, hardly perceiving anything of ourselves but our own ghost—­a colourless shadow which is but the social representation of the real and largely concealed Ego.  Hence our life unfolds in space rather than in time.  We live for the external world rather than for ourselves, we speak rather than think, we are “acted” rather than “act” ourselves.  To act freely, however, is to recover possession of one’s real self and to get back into la duree reele. [Footnote:  Time and Free Will, p. 232 (Fr. p. 178).]

Real Time, then, is a living reality, not discrete, not spatial in character—­an utter contrast to that fictitious Time with which so many thinkers have busied themselves, setting up “as concrete reality the distinct moments of a Time which they have reduced to powder, while the unity which enables us to call the grains ‘powder’ they hold to be much more artificial.  Others place themselves in the eternal.  But as their eternity remains, notwithstanding, abstract since it is empty, being the eternity of a concept which by hypothesis excludes from itself the opposing concept, one does not see how this eternity would permit of an indefinite number of moments co-existing in it, an eternity of death, since it is nothing else than the movement emptied of the mobility which made its life.” [Footnote:  An Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 51-54.] The true view of Time, as la duree, would make us see it as a duration which expands, contracts, and intensifies