TIME, MECHANICAL AND ORGANIC

While mechanical time is strung out in a succession of mathematically isolated instants, organic time – what Bergson calls duration – is cumulative in its effects. Though mechanical time can, in a sense, be speeded up or run backward, like the hands of a clock or the images of a moving pictures, organic time moves in only one direction – through the cycle of birth, death, development, decay, and death – and that the past that is already dead remains present in the future that has still to be born.

Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, p.15-16