The function of the intellect is to preside over actions. Now, in action, it is the result that interests us; the means matter little provided the end is attained. Thence it comes that we are altogether bent on the end to be reahzed, generaUy trusting ourselves to it in order that the idea may become an act; and thence it comes also that only the goal where our activity will rest is pictured explicitly to our mind : the movements constituting the action itself dther elude our consciousness or reach it only confusedly. Let ua consider a very simple act, like that of lifting the arm. Where should we be if we bad to imagine beforehand all the elemental}' contractions and tensions this act involves, or even to perceive them, one by one, as they are accomplished? But the mind is carried immediately to the end, that is to say, to the schematic and simplified vision of the act supposed accomplished. Then, if no antagonistic idea neutralizes the effect of the first idea, the appropriate movements come of themselves to fill out the plan, drawn in some way by the void of its gaps. The intellect, then, only represents to the activity ends to attain, that is to say, points of rest. And, from one end attained to another end attained, from one rest to another rest, our activity is carried by a series of leaps, during
300 Creative Evolution
which our consciousness is turned away as much as possible from the movement going on, to regard only the anticipated image of the movement accomplished.
Now, in order that it may represent as uomovable the result of the act which is being accomplished, the intellect must perceive, as also unmovable, the surround- ings in which this result is being framed. Our activity is fitted into the material world. If matter appeared to us as a perpetual flowing, we should assign no termina- tion to any of our actions. We should feel each of them dissolve as fast as it was accomplished, and we should not anticipate an ever-fleeting future. In order that our activity may leap from an act to an act, it is necessary that matter should pass from a state to a state, for it is only into a state of the material world that action can fit a result, so as to be accomplished. But is it thus that matter presents itself?
A priori we may presiune that our perception manages to apprehend matter with this bias. Sensory organs and motor organs are in fact coordinated with each other. Now, the first symbolize our faculty of perceiving, as the second our faculty of acting. The organism thus evidences, in a visible and tangible form, the perfect accord of per- ception and action. So if our activity always aims at a result into which it is momentarily fitted, our perception must retain of the material world, at every moment, only a staie in which it is provisionally placed. This is the most natural hypothesis. And it is easy to see that experience confirms it.
From our first glance at the world, before we even
make our bodies in it, we distinguish qiadilies. Color
succeeds to color, sound to sound, resistance to resist-
ance, etc. Each of these qualities, taken separately, is a
state that seems to persist as such, unmovable until an-
It.)
other replaces it. Yet each of these qualities resolves itself, on analysis, into an enormous number of elementary movements. Whether we see in it vibrations or whether we represent it in any other way, one fact is certain, it is that every quality is change. In vain, moreover, shall we seek beneath the change the thing which changes: it is always provisionally, and in order to satisfy our imagination, that we attach the movement to a mobile. The mobile flies for ever before the pursuit of science, which is concerned with mobility alone. In the smallest discernible fraction of a second, in the almost instantaneous perception of a sensible quality, there may be trillions of oscillations which repeat themselves. The permanence of a sensible quality consists in this repetition of move- ments, as the persistence of life consists in a series of pal- pitations. The primal function of perception is precisely to grasp a series of elementary changes under the form of a quality or of a simple state, by a work of condensation. The greater the power of acting bestowed upon an animal species, the more numerous, probably, are the elementary changes that its faculty of perceiving concentrates into one of its instants. And the progress must be continuous, in nature, from the beings that vibrate almost in unison with the oscillations of the ether, up to those that embrace trillions of these oscillations in the shortest of their simple perceptions. The first feel hardly anj-thing but move- ments; the others perceive quality. The first are almost caught up in the running-gear of things; the others react, and the tension of their faculty of acting is probably pro- portional to the concentration of their faculty of per- ceiving. The progress goes on even in humanity itself. A man is so much the more a "man of action" as he can embrace in a glance a greater number of events: he who perceives successive events one by ons will allow himself
to be led by them ; he who grasps them as a whole will
dominate them. In short, the qualities of matter are so
many stable views that we take of its instability.
Now, in the continuity of sensible qualities we mark off the boundaries of bodies. Each of these bodies really changes at every moment. In the first place, it resolves itself into a group of qualities, and every quality, as we said, consists of a succession of elementary movements. But, even if we regard the quality as a stable state, the body is still unstable in that it changes qualities without ceeising. The body pre-eminently — ^that which we are most justified in isolating within the continuity of matter, because it constitutes a relatively closed system — is the living body; it is, moreover, for it that we cut out the others within the whole. Now, life is an evolution. We concentrate a period of this evolution in a stable view which we call a form, and, when the change has become considerable enough to overcome the fortunate inertia of our per- ception, we say that the body has changed its form. But in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form : form is only a snapshot view of a traTisition . There- fore, here again, our perception manages to sohdify into discontinuous images the fluid continuity of the real. When the successive images do not differ from each other too much, we consider them all as the waxing and waning of a single mean image, or as the deformation of this image in different directions. And to this mean we really allude when we speak of the essence of a thing, or of the thing itself.
Finally things, once constituted, show on the surface,
by their changes of situation, the profound changes that
are being accomplished within the Whole. We say then
Form and Becoming 303
that they ad on one another. This action appears to u8, no doubt, in the form of movement. But from the mobihty of the movement we turn away as much aa we can; what interests us is, as we said above, the unmovable plan of the movement rather than the movement itself. Is it a simple movement? We ask ourselves where it is going. It is by its direction, that is to say, by the position of its provisional end, that we represent it at every moment. Is it a complex movement? We would know above all what is going on, what the movement is doing — in other words, the result obtained or the presiding intention. Examine closely what is in your mind when you speak of an action in course of accomplishment. The idea of change is there, I am willing to grant, but it is hidden in the penumbra. In the full light is the motionless plan of the act supposed accomplished. It is by this, and by this only, that the complex act is distinguished and defined. We should be very much embarrassed if we had to imagine the movements inherent in the actions of eating, drinking, fighting, etc. It is enough for us to know, in a genera! and indefinite way, that all these acts are movements. Once that side of the matter has been settled, we simply seek to represent the general plan of each of these complex movements, that is to say the motionless design that under- lies them. Here again knowledge bears on a state rather than on a change. It is therefore the same with this third case as with the others. Whether the movement be quahtative or evolutionary or extensive, the mind manages to take stable views of the instability. And thence the mind derives, as we have just shown, three kinds of repre- sentations: (1) qualities, (2) forms of essences, (3) acts.
To these three ways of seeing correspond three categories of words: adjectives, substantices, and verbs, which are the prinaordial elements of language. Adjectives and sub-
304 Creative Evolution
■tantives therefore symbolize states. But the verb it-
aelf, if we keep to the clear part of the idea it calls up,
hardly expresses anything else.
Now, if we try to characterize more precisely our natural attitude towards Becoming, this is what we find. Be- coming is infinitely varied. That which goes from yellow to green is not like that which goes from green to blue: they are different qualitative movements. That which goes from flower to fruit is not hke that which goes from larva to nymph and from nymph to perfect insect: they are different evoluiiojiary movements. The action of eat- ing or of drinking is not like the action of fighting: they are different extensive movements. And these three kinds of movement themselves — qualitative, evolutionary, ex- tensive — differ profoundly. The trick of our perception, like that of our inteUigence, like that of our language, consists in extracting from these profoundly different becomings the single representation of becoming in general, undefined becoming, a mere abstraction which by itself says nothing and of which, indeed, it Is very rarely that we think. To this idea, always the same, and always obscure or unconscious, we then join, in each particular case, one or several clear images that represent states and which serve to distinguish all becomings from each other. It is this composition of a specified and definite state with change gener^ and undefined that we substitute for the specific change. An infinite multiplicity of becomings variously colored, 80 to speak, passes before our eyes: we manage so that we see only differences of color, that is to say, diffe> ences of state, beneath which there is supposed to flow, hidden from our \*iew, a becoming always and every- where the same, invariably c Suppose we wish to portray on a screen a living pictm