Henri Bergson, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Real duration (durée) is the qualitative, heterogeneous, indivisible flow of lived experience, in which moments interpenetrate rather than juxtapose and in which the past presses forward into a present that is genuinely creative of the future. Spatialized time — the homogeneous medium of clocks, of physics, of associationist psychology — is what discursive intelligence produces by translating duration into the form of extended quantity, treating successive moments as if they were points along a line.
The translation is useful for action and for science. It is not metaphysically faithful. When we ask the deepest questions about consciousness, freedom, life, and time itself, the spatialized representation is the obstacle, not the resource.1234
Let us then take this duration for what it is, for a negation, a barrier to seeing all, steadily pushed back; our acts themselves will no longer seem like a contribution of unforeseeable novelty. They will be part of Ïlhe universal weave of things, given at one stroke. We do not Introduce them into the world: it is the world that introduces them ready-made into us, into our consciousness, as we reach Èhem.Duration and Simultaneity, pp. 107–109
We once described the mechanism of this process; we have also shown how the difficulties raised by philosophers ized time to pure duration. Let us confine ourselves here to remarking that no matter how much this operation appears learned, it is native to the human mind; we practice it instinctively. Its recipe is deposited in the language.Duration and Simultaneity, p. 100
But the truth is that there is neither a -175- rigid, immovable substratum nor distinct states passing over it like actors on a stage. There is simply the continuous melody of our inner life,--a melody which is going on and will go on, indivisible, from the beginning to the end of our conscious existence. Our personality is precisely that.The Creative Mind, pp. 171–172
Even then one must ask in certain cases, if the obstacles have not become surmountable thanks to the creative action which surmounted them: the action, unforeseeable in itself, would then have created the "surmountability." Before it, the obstacles were insurmountable, and without it, they would have remained so.The Creative Mind, pp. 306–307
The position has been the standing target of analytic objection since Russell. The standard charge takes two forms: that the distinction between qualitative duration and quantitative time is psychological introspection masquerading as metaphysics; and that the critique of spatialized time confuses the limits of one representation with the limits of all representation. Both charges misread the argument. Spatialized time is not metaphysically neutral. It is what intelligence produces by analogy with extended magnitude, and the analogy carries philosophical commitments — reversibility, homogeneity, the equivalence of past and future directions — that are not faithful to time as it is lived or, on Bergson's argument, to time as it actually is. The argument from experience is not introspectionism; it is the demonstration that what science abstracts from is real and that the abstraction does not exhaust what it leaves behind. Heisenberg, de Broglie, Prigogine, and a line of philosophically alert physicists have, across the twentieth century, found in Bergson a resource rather than an embarrassment.