views
that are instantaneous and by that very fact immobile of the becoming of
matter. Consciousness, being in its turn formed on the intellect, sees
clearly of the inner life what is already made, and only feels
confusedly the making. Thus, we pluck out of duration those moments that
interest us, and that we have gathered along its course. These alone we
retain. And we are right in so doing, while action only is in question.
But when, in _speculating_ on the _nature_ of the real, we go on
regarding it as our practical interest requires us to regard it, we
become unable to perceive the true evolution, the radical becoming. Of
becoming we perceive only states, of duration only instants, and even
when we speak of duration and of becoming, it is of another thing that
we are thinking. Such is the most striking of the two illusions we wish
to examine. It consists in supposing that we can think the unstable by
means of the stable, the moving by means of the immobile.

The other illusion is near akin to the first. It has the same origin,
being also due to the fact that we import into speculation a procedure
made for practice. All action aims at getting something that we feel the
want of, or at creating something that does not yet exist. In this very
special sense, it fills a void, and goes from the empty to the full,
from an absence to a presence, from the unreal to the real. Now the
unreality which is here in question is purely relative to the direction
in which our attention is engaged, for we are immersed in realities and
cannot pass out of them; only, if the present reality is not the one we
are seeking, we speak of the _absence_ of this sought-for reality
wherever we find the _presence_ of another. We thus express what we have
as a function of what we want. This is quite legitimate in the sphere of
action. But, whether we will or no, we keep to this way of speaking,
and also of thinking, when we speculate on the nature of things
independently of the interest they have for us. Thus arises the second
of the two illusions. We propose to examine this first. It is due, like
the other, to the static habits that our intellect contracts when it
prepares our action on things. Just as we pass through the immobile to
go to the moving, so we make use of the void in order to think the full.

We have met with this illusion already in dealing with the fundamental
problem of knowledge. The question, we then said, is to know why there
is