Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/289

 were, an accidental addition, but as a true and, in some sort, an independent, reality. Neither science nor consciousness, then, is opposed to this last proposition:—

''IV. Real movement is rather the transference of a state than of a thing.''

By formulating these four propositions, we have, in reality, only been progressively narrowing the interval between the two terms which it is usual to oppose to each other,—qualities or sensations, and movements. At first sight, the distance appears impassable. Qualities are heterogeneous, movements homogeneous. Sensations, essentially indivisible, escape measurement; movements, always divisible, are distinguished by calculable differences of direction and velocity. We are fain to put qualities, in the form of sensations, in consciousness; while movements are supposed to take place independently of us in space. These movements, compounded together, we confess, will never yield anything but movements; our consciousness, though incapable of coming into touch with them, yet by a mysterious process is said to translate them into sensations, which afterwards project themselves into space and come to overlie, we know not how, the movements they translate. Hence two different worlds, incapable of communicating otherwise than by a miracle,—on the one hand that of motion