is only the brightest point in a moving zone
which understands all that we feel, think, wish; in fact, all that we
are at a given moment. It is this zone which really constitutes our
state. But we may observe that states defined in this way are not
distinct elements. They are an endless stream of mutual continuity."

And do not think that perhaps such a description represents only or
principally our life of feeling. Reason and thought share the same
characteristic, as soon as we penetrate their living depth, whether it
be a question of creative invention or of those primordial judgments
which direct our activity. If they evidence greater stability, it is in
permanence of direction, because our past remains present to us.

For we are endowed with memory, and that perhaps is, on the whole, our
most profound characteristic. It is by memory we enlarge ourselves and
draw continually upon the wealth of our treasuries. Hence comes the
completely original nature of the change which constitutes us. But it
is here that we must shake off familiar representations! Common-sense
cannot think in terms of movement. It forges a static conception of it,
and destroys it by arresting it under pretext of seeing it better. To
define movement as a series of positions, with a generating law, with a
time-table or correspondence sheet between places and times, is surely
a ready-made presentation. Are we not confusing the trajectory and its
performance, the points traversed and the traversing of the points, the
result of the genesis of the result; in short, the quantitative distance
over which the flight extends, and the qualitative flight which puts
this distance behind it? In this way the very mobility which is the
essence of movement vanishes. There is the same common mistake about
time. Analytic and synthetic thought can see in time only a string of
coincidences, each of them instantaneous, a logical series of relations.
It imagines the whole of it to be a graduated slide-rule, in which the
luminous point called the present is the geometrical index.

Thus it gives form to time in space, "a kind of fourth dimension,"
("Essay on the Immediate Data".) or at least it reduces it to nothing
more than an abstract scheme of succession, "a stream without bottom
or sides, flowing without determinable strength, in an indefinable
direction." ("Introduction to Metaphysics".) It requires time to be
homogeneous, and every homogeneous medium is space, "for