Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/266

 our states melt into each other. It is within this that we should try to replace ourselves by thought, in the exceptional and unique case when we speculate on the intimate nature of action, that is to say, when we are discussing human freedom.

Is a method of this kind applicable to the problem of matter? The question is, whether, in this 'diversity of phenomena' of which Kant spoke, that part which shows a vague tendency towards extension could be seized by us on the hither side of the homogeneous space to which it is applied and through which we subdivide it,—just as that part which goes to make up our own inner life can be detached from time, empty and indefinite, and brought back to pure duration. Certainly it would be a chimerical enterprise to try to free ourselves from the fundamental conditions of external perception. But the question is whether certain conditions, which we usually regard as fundamental, do not rather concern the use to be made of things, the practical advantage to be drawn from them, far more than the pure knowledge which we can have of them. More particularly, in regard to concrete extension, continuous, diversified and at the same time organized, we do not see why it should be bound up with the amorphous and inert space which subtends it—a space which we divide indefinitely, out of which we carve figures arbitrarily, and in which movement itself, as we have