[The philosophy of ideas] starts from the Form; it sees in the Form the very essence of reality. It does not take Form as a snapshot of becoming; it posits form in the Eternal; of this motionless eternity, then duration and becoming are supposed to be only the degradation. . . . From the standpoint of ancient philosophy, space and time can be nothing but the field an incomplete reality, or rather a reality that has gone astray from itself, needs in order to run in quest of itself. Only it must be admitted that the field is created as the hunting progresses, and that the hunting in some way deposits the field beneath it.

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

In reality, there is no one rhythm of duration; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness, and thereby fix their places in the scale of being. . . . Do we not sometimes perceive in ourselves, in sleep, two contemporaneous and distinct persons of whom one sleeps a few minutes, while the other dream fills days and weeks? And would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution? In short, then, to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intensive life, and in the summing up of a very long history. To perceive means to immobilize.

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory