Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/303

to bind them together by a kind of qualitative deduction; mechanism attaching itself rather, in any one of these cross-cuts, to the divisions made in its breadth, that is to say, to instantaneous differences in magnitude and position, and striving no less vainly to produce, by the variation of these differences, the succession of sensible qualities. Shall we then seek refuge in the other hypothesis, and maintain, with Kant, that space and time are forms of our sensibility? If we do, we shall have to look upon matter and spirit as equally unknowable. Now, if we compare these two hypotheses, we discover in them a common basis: by setting up homogeneous time and homogeneous space either as realities that are contemplated or as forms of contemplation, they both attribute to space and time an interest which is speculative rather than vital. Hence there is room, between metaphysical dogmatism on the one hand and critical philosophy on the other, for a doctrine which regards homogeneous space and time as principles of division and of solidification introduced into the real with a view to action and not with a view to knowledge, which attributes to things a real duration and a real extensity, and which, in the end, sees the source of all difficulty no longer in that duration and in that extensity (which really belong to things and are directly manifest to the mind), but in the homogeneous space and time which we stretch out beneath them in order to divide the continuous, to fix the