Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/291

with pure vibrations? In cases where the rhythm of the movement is slow enough to tally with the habits of our consciousness,—as in the case of the deep notes of the musical scale, for instance,—do we not feel that the quality perceived analyses itself into repeated and successive vibrations, bound together by an inner continuity? That which usually hinders this mutual approach of motion and quality is the acquired habit of attaching movement to elements—atoms or what not,—which interpose their solidity between the movement itself and the quality into which it contracts. As our daily experience shows us bodies in motion, it appears to us that there ought to be, in order to sustain the elementary movements to which qualities may be reduced, diminutive bodies or corpuscles. Motion becomes then for our imagination no more than an accident, a series of positions, a change of relations; and, as it is a law of our representation that in it the stable drives away the unstable, the important and central element for us becomes the atom, between the successive positions of which movement then becomes a mere link. But not only has this conception the inconvenience of merely carrying over to the atom all the problems raised by matter; not only does it wrongly set up as an absolute that division of matter which, in our view, is hardly anything but an outward projection of human needs; it also renders unintelligible the process by which we grasp, in perception, at one and the same time, a