One or many durations? We can take the idea of a virtual coexistence and extend or apply it to the whole of the universe. “This idea, no longer simply signifies my relationship with being, but the relationship of all things with being. Everything happens as if the universe were a tremendous Memory.” It opens the door to “a radical plurality of durations…(where) the universe is made up of modifications, disturbances, changes of tension, and of energy, and nothing else.”

In what way can we say objects endure? Not in and of themselves, but in relationship to the whole of the universe.

Now we get at the heart of his critique of Einstein. For Bergson, “there is only one time (monism), although there is an infinity of actual fluxes (generalized pluralism) that necessarily participate in the same virtual whole (limited pluralism).”