The method followed to find a genuine solution must be inverse; not
dialectic combination of pre-existing concepts, but, setting out from a
direct and really lived intuition, a descent to ever new concepts along
dynamic schemes which remain open. From the same intuition spring many
concepts: "As the wind which rushes into the crossroads divides into
diverging currents of air, which are all only one and the same gust."
("Creative Evolution", page 55.)

The antinomies are resolved genetically, whilst in the plane of language
they remain irreducible. With a heterogeneity of shades, when we mix the
tints and neutralise them by one another, we easily create homogeneity;
but take the result of this work, that is to say, the average final
colour, and it will be impossible to reconstitute the wealth of the
original.

Do you desire a precise example of the work we must accomplish? Take
that of change; (Cf. two lectures delivered by Mr Bergson at Oxford on
"The Perception of Change", 26th and 27th May 1911.) no other is more
significant or clearer. It shows us two necessary movements in the
reform of our habits of imagination or conception.

Let us try first of all to familiarise ourselves with the images which
show us the fixity deriving from becoming.

Two colliding waves, two rollers meeting, typify rest by extinction and
interference. With the movement of a stone, and the fluidity of running
water, we form the instantaneous position of a ricochet. The very
movement of the stone, seen in the successive positions of the tangent
to the trajectory, is stationary to our view.

What is dynamic stability, except non-variation arising from variation
itself? Equilibrium is produced from speed. A man running solidifies
the moving ground. In short, two moving bodies regulated by each other
become fixed in relation to each other.

After this, let us try to perceive change in itself, and then represent
it to ourselves according to its specific and original nature.

The common conception needs reform on two principal points:

(1) All change is revealed in the light of immediate intuition, not as
a numerical series of states, but a rhythm of phases, each of which
constitutes an indivisible act, in such a way that each change has its
natural inner articulations, forbidding us to break it up according to
arbitrary laws, like a homogeneous length.

(2) Change is self-sufficient; it has no need of a support, a moving
body, a "thing" i