Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/312

 pied above all by the convenience of expression and the exigencies of material life, prefers to invert the natural order of the terms. Accustomed to seek its fulcrum in a world of readymade motionless images, of which the apparent fixity is hardly anything else but the outward reflexion of the stability of our lower needs, it cannot help believing that rest is anterior to motion, cannot avoid taking rest as its point of reference and its abiding place, so that it comes to see movement as only a variation of distance, space being thus supposed to precede motion. Then, in a space which is homogeneous and infinitely divisible, we draw, in imagination, a trajectory and fix positions: afterwards, applying the movement to the trajectory, we see it divisible like the line we have drawn, and equally denuded of quality. Can we wonder that our understanding, working thenceforward on this idea, which represents precisely the reverse of the truth, discovers in it nothing but contradictions? Having assimilated movements to space, we find these movements homogeneous like space; and since we no longer see in them anything but calculable differences of direction and velocity, all relation between movement and quality is for us destroyed. So that all we have to do is to shut up motion in space, qualities in consciousness, and