Let us take the perception of bodies. It is easy to show--and I regret
that I cannot here reproduce Mr Bergson's masterly demonstration--that the
division of matter into distinct objects with sharp outlines is produced by
a selection of images which is completely relative to our practical needs.

"The distinct outlines which we assign to an object, and which bestow upon
it its individuality, are nothing but the graph of a certain kind of
influence which we should be able to employ at a certain point in space:
it is the plan of our future actions which is submitted to our eyes, as in
a mirror, when we perceive the surfaces and edges of things. Remove this
action, and in consequence the high roads which it makes for itself in
advance by perception, in the web of reality, and the individuality of the
body will be reabsorbed in the universal interaction which is without doubt
reality itself." Which is tantamount to saying that "rough bodies are cut
in the material of nature by a perception of which the scissors follow, in
some sort, the dotted line along which the action would pass." ("Creative
Evolution", page 12.)

Bodies independent of common experience do not then appear, to an attentive
criticism, as veritable realities which would have an existence in
themselves. They are only centres of co-ordination for our actions. Or,
if you prefer it, "our needs are so many shafts of light which, when played
upon the continuity of perceptible qualities, produce in them the outline
of distinct bodies." ("Matter and Memory", page 220.) Does not science
too, after its own fashion, resolve the atom into a centre of intersecting
relations, which finally extend by degrees to the entire universe in an
indissoluble interpenetration?

A qualitative continuity, imperceptibly shaded off, over which pass quivers
that here and there converge, is the image by which we are forced to