   Many of Bergson characterizations of duration are negative: he tells us a good deal about what it is not, but comparatively little about what it actually is. While this can sometimes be frustrating, there is a rationale for it: Bergson held that any attempt to conceptualize the flux of consciousness could succeed only at the cost of distorting the phenomena – a doctrine which influenced William James in his later years (for more on this see Dainton (2017) and Section 3 of the supplementary  document The Specious Present: Further Issues). 