ntervening multiples, and look only at the extreme poles of
the series.

We are inclined to imagine too abrupt a severance between gesture and
dream, between action and thought, between body and mind. There are not
two plane surfaces, without thickness or transition, placed one above
the other on different levels; it is by an imperceptible degradation of
increasing depth, and decreasing materiality, that we pass from one term
to the other.

And the characteristics are continually changing in the course of the
transition. Thus our initial problem confronts us again, more acutely
than ever: are the forms of number and space equally suitable on all
planes of consciousness?

Let us consider the most external of these planes of life, and one which
is in contact with the outer world, the one which receives directly the
impressions of external reality. We live as a rule on the surface of
ourselves, in the numerical and spatial dispersion of language and
gesture. Our deeper ego is covered as it were with a tough crust,
hardened in action: it is a skein of motionless and numerable habits,
side by side, and of distinct and solid things, with sharp outlines and
mechanical relations. And it is for the representation of the phenomena
which occur within this dead rind that space and number are valid.

For we have to live, I mean live our common daily life, with our body,
with our customary mechanism rather than with our true depths. Our
attention is therefore most often directed by a natural inclination to
the practical worth and useful function of our internal states, to the
public object of which they are the sign, to the effect they produce
externally, to the gestures by which we express them in space. A
social average of individual modalities interests us more than the
incommunicable originality of our deeper life. The words of language
besides offer us so many symbolic centres round which crystallise groups
of motor mechanisms set up by habit, the only usual elements of our
internal determinations. Now, contact with society has rendered these
motor mechanisms practically identical in all men. Hence, whether it be
a question of sensation, feeling, or ideas, we have these neutral
dry and colourless residua, which spread lifeless over the surface of
ourselves, "like dead leaves on the water of a pond." ("Essay on the
Immediate Data," page 102.)

Thus the progress we have lived falls into the rank of a thing that can
be handle