Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/302

 found in our memory-shot perception, are in fact the successive moments obtained by a solidification of the real. But, in order to distinguish these moments, and also to bind them together by a thread which shall be common alike to our own existence and to that of things, we are bound to imagine a diagrammatic design of succession in general, an homogeneous and indifferent medium, which is to the flow of matter in the sense of length as space is to it in the sense of breadth: herein consists homogeneous time.

Homogeneous space and homogeneous time are then neither properties of things nor essential conditions of our faculty of knowing them: they express, in an abstract form, the double work of solidification and of division which we effect on the moving continuity of the real in order to obtain there a fulcrum for our action, in order to fix within it starting-points for our operation, in short, to introduce into it real changes. They are the diagrammatic design of our eventual action upon matter. The first mistake, that which consists in viewing this homogeneous time and space as properties of things, leads to the insurmountable difficulties of metaphysical dogmatism,—whether mechanistic or dynamistic,—dynamism erecting into so many absolutes the successive cross-cuts which we make in the course of the universe as it flows along, and then endeavouring vainly