Duration, Memory, and the Elan Vital

“Bergson on duration: 'Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states... it creates new forms, forging them as it advances. [...] It is not a question of discrete moments added together but of a continuous movement in which past and present interpenetrate.' [...] On memory: 'The past is preserved in its entirety. What we call memory is not the retrieval of a stored trace but the actualization of the whole past at the level of the present.' [...] On the elan vital: 'Life is a tendency to act on inert matter... The truth is that life is movement, materiality is the inverse movement, and each of these two movements is simple, the matter and life of which the world is made being essentially two different directions of one and the same movement.' — Bergson, Time and Free Will (1889); Matter and Memory (1896); Creative Evolution (1907); SEP 'Henri Bergson'”