Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/268

 I.—Every movement, inasmuch as it is a passage from rest to rest, is absolutely indivisible.

This is not an hypothesis, but a fact, generally masked by an hypothesis.

Here, for example, is my hand, placed at the point A. I carry it to the point B, passing at one stroke through the interval between them. There are two things in this movement: an image which I see, and an act of which my muscular sense makes my consciousness aware. My consciousness gives me the inward feeling of a single fact, for in A was rest, in B there is again rest, and between A and B is placed an indivisible or at least an undivided act, the passage from rest to rest, which is movement itself. But my sight perceives the movement in the form of a line AB which is traversed, and this line, like all space, may be indefinitely divided. It seems then, at first sight, that I may at will take this movement to be multiple or indivisible, according as I consider it in space or in time, as an image which takes shape outside of me or as an act which I am myself accomplishing.

Yet, when I put aside all preconceived ideas, I soon perceive that I have no such choice, that even my sight takes in the movement from A to B as an indivisible whole, and that if it divides anything, it is the line supposed to have been traversed, and not the movement traversing it. It is indeed