Time & Perspective Quote by Henri Bergson

Bergson treats time not as a string of inert instants but as duration, a living flow in which the past endures within the present. When he says the past is preserved by itself automatically, he rejects the notion that memories are dead records stored like files. Preservation is not an external archiving but an internal persistence: what has been lived continues to subsist as a virtual whole that leans over the now, inflecting perception and choice.

This line crystallizes themes from Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution. Bergson distinguishes habit memory, the skills embodied in our nervous system, from pure memory, the immaterial survival of lived experience. The brain, in his view, does not warehouse the past; it selects and channels what is useful for action. The past remains intact beyond what the body needs, and recollection is an act of actualizing a slice of that enduring reservoir. Hence the past’s preservation is automatic because it is the very texture of duration, not the result of conscious effort.

Such a view refuses to spatialize time. If we picture time like points laid out on a line, the past must vanish to make room for the present. But if time is qualitative accumulation, each moment thickens with what came before. Personal identity then becomes continuity of growth, a creative layering in which every choice bears the weight and nuance of a whole history. Freedom, for Bergson, springs from this depth: we are not choosing as blank slates but as beings whose past is alive in the act.

There is a psychological resonance here. Much of what shapes perception and behavior operates below explicit recall, yet it is precisely because the past remains that we can understand, reinterpret, and transform it. Artistic intuition, moral insight, even the surprise of a genuinely new idea, arise when the present meets the preserved past and something unforeseen emerges from their contact.