Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/284

 conservation of the individual or of the species; and each of them leads us to distinguish, besides our own body, bodies independent of it which we must seek or avoid. Our needs are, then, so many search-lights which, directed upon the continuity of sensible qualities, single out in it distinct bodies. They cannot satisfy themselves except upon the condition that they carve out, within this continuity, a body which is to be their own, and then delimit other bodies with which the first can enter into relation, as if with persons. To establish these special relations among portions thus carved out from sensible reality is just what we call living.

But if this first subdivision of the real answers much less to immediate intuition than to the fundamental needs of life, are we likely to gain a nearer knowledge of things by pushing the division yet further? In this way we do indeed prolong the vital movement; but we turn our back upon true knowledge. That is why the rough and ready operation, which consists in decomposing the body into parts of the same nature as itself, leads us down a blind alley, where we soon feel ourselves incapable of conceiving either why this division should cease or how it could go on ad infinitum. It is nothing, in fact, but the ordinary condition of useful action, unsuitably transported into the domain of pure knowledge. We shall never explain by means of