Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/277

motion there is in the whole, none the less. Therefore it is not surprising that the same thinkers, who maintain that every particular movement is relative, speak of the totality of movements as of an absolute. The contradiction has been pointed out in Descartes, who, after having given to the thesis of relativity its most radical form by affirming that all movement is 'reciprocal,'^[1] formulated the laws of motion as though motion were an absolute.^[2] Leibniz and others after him have remarked this contradiction^[3]: it is due simply to the fact that Descartes handles motion as a physicist after having defined it as a geometer. For the geometer all movement is relative: which signifies only, in our view, that none of our mathematical symbols can express the fact that it is the moving body which is in motion rather than the axes or the points to which it is referred. And this is very natural, because these symbols, always meant for measurement, can express only distances. But that there is real motion no one can seriously deny: if there were not, nothing in the universe would change; and, above all, there would be no meaning in the consciousness which we have of our own movements. In his controversy with Descartes Henry More makes jesting allusion to this last

1. Descartes, Principes, ii, 29.
2. Principes, part ii, § 37 et seq.
3. Leibniz, Specimen dynamicum (Mathem. Schriften, Gerhardt, 2nd section, vol. ii, p. 246).