movement is added to the atom, as a supplementary accident to a body
previously at rest; and, by becoming, the pre-existent terms are strung
together like pearls on a necklace. It delights in rest, and endeavours to
bring to rest all that moves. Immobility appears to it to be the base of
existence. It decomposes and pulverises every change and every phenomenon,
until it finds the invariable element in them. It is immobility which it
esteems as primary, fundamental, intelligible of itself; and motion, on the
contrary, which it seeks to explain as a function of immobility. And so it
tends, out of progresses and transitions, to make things. To see
distinctly, it appears to need a dead halt. What indeed are concepts but
logical look-out stations along the path of becoming? what are they but
motionless external views, taken at intervals, of an uninterrupted stream
of movement?

Each of them isolates and fixes an aspect, "as the instantaneous lightning
flashes on a storm-scene in the darkness." ("Matter and Memory", page
209.)

Placed together, they make a net laid in advance, a strong meshwork in
which the human intelligence posts itself securely to spy the flux of
reality, and seize it as it passes. Such a proceeding is made for the
practical world, and is out of place in the speculative. Everywhere we are
trying to find constants, identities, non-variants, states; and we imagine
ideal science as an open eye which gazes for ever upon objects that do not
move. The constant is the concrete support demanded by our action: the
matter upon which we operate must not escape our grasp and slip through our
hands, if we are to be able to work it. The constant, again, is the
element of language, in which the word represents its inert permanence, in
which it constitutes the solid fulcrum, the foundation and landmark of
dialectic progress, being that which can be discarded by the mind, whose