recognise a superior degree of reality.

But is this perceptible material, this qualitative continuity, the pure
fact in matter? Not yet. Perception, we said just now, is always in
reality complicated by memory. There is more truth in this than we had
seen. Reality is not a motionless spectrum, extending to our view its
infinite shades; it might rather be termed a leaping flame in the spectrum.
All is in passage, in process of becoming.

On this flux consciousness concentrates at long intervals, each time
condensing into one "quality" an immense period of the inner history of
things. "In just this way the thousand successive positions of a runner
contract into one single symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which
art reproduces, and which becomes for everybody the representation of a man
running." ("Matter and Memory", page 233.)

In the same way again, a red light, continuing one second, embodies such a
large number of elementary pulsations that it would take 25,000 years of
our time to see its distinct passage. From here springs the subjectivity
of our perception. The different qualities correspond, roughly speaking,
to the different rhythms of contraction or dilution, to the different
degrees of inner tension in the perceiving consciousness.

Pushing the case to its limits, and imagining a complete expansion, matter
would resolve into colourless disturbances, and become the "pure matter" of
the natural philosopher.

Let us now unite in one single continuity the different periods of the
preceding dialectic. Vibration, qualities, and bodies are none of them
reality by themselves; but all the same they are part of reality. And