ABSTRACT
Henri Bergson introduced his concept of durée or "duration" in his first book, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (English translation Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness) in 1889. The concept of durée remained at the centre of Bergson's philosophy. Although Bergson believed, contra Kant that it was possible for us to attain knowledge of the real - of both the "inner" world of experience and "outer" world of physical reality - he did not believe it was easy. To arrive at a remotely adequate understanding of inner reality - that of durée réelle - we have to struggle to overcome our natural "spatializing" tendencies. In Bergson's eyes, the associationist movement in psychology was guilty of having succumbed to space-dominated ways of conceiving time. One of Bergson's main goals in Matter and Memory is to clarify the relationship between the physical and the mental.
